Illustration representing vendor lock-in and infrastructure dependency

Don Shin changed my mind at the Cleveland AI Summit.

Thirty years in emerging tech, and he’s watched this same pattern repeat with every fast-adopted tool.

Here’s how it happens.

You pick a vendor. Claude, OpenAI, whoever. You made the fast choice, not the strategic one. You need AI working yesterday, the API is clean, the integration takes a week. So you move.

Then, as you build on top of it, the workflows get deeper, your team gets trained, and your data starts flowing through it. Your processes depend on it.

Predictably, the costs rise or terms change and you realize there’s no harness you actually own. You’ve built on rented land and not even the foundation belongs to you.

I’ve seen this time and again with martech vendors, CRMs, ERPs. With any “fast win” that trades architecture for speed. The moment everything works, you stop asking whether you own it.

What’s different now is the scale. AI moves so fast that organizations are betting their whole operation on someone else’s infrastructure.

Don put it plainly: protect vendor optionality, keep your AI IP portable.

Most won’t. The trap never feels like a trap when you’re moving fast.

Have you started protecting your architecture, or is speed still winning?