No executive decides to be locked in to an AI vendor. It happens one convenient choice at a time: a prompt tuned to one model, an embedding format only one database reads, a connector built for one platform. Two years later the company's roadmap depends on a supplier's pricing and release schedule. The steps that prevent this are cheap early and expensive late.
Lock-in builds up across five layers at once.
The model layer is the obvious one. Less visible are the orchestration layer, where agent logic is written in a vendor's framework; the data layer, where documents are embedded in a proprietary format; the tool layer, where connectors only work with one platform; and the people layer, where teams learn one vendor's way of working. Each layer adds switching cost, and together they make switching unthinkable.
Seven steps keep your options open.
First, own your task contracts and evaluations. Define each task's inputs, outputs and quality bar yourself, and keep the test sets in your own repository.
Second, keep business logic and calculations out of prompts. Rules and numbers belong in code that any model can call.
Third, use open protocols for tools. Model Context Protocol servers let any compliant model use the same governed connectors.
Fourth, keep data and embeddings portable. Store source data in your own environment and make sure you can re-embed it with a different model at any time.
Fifth, put a routing layer between applications and providers, so traffic can move between models without changing application code.
Sixth, negotiate exit terms before you need them, including data export, notice of model retirement and notice of price changes.
Seventh, test a switch every year. Move one real workload to an alternative model or provider and measure what broke. The drill tells you what a forced migration would cost.
The cheapest time to plan your exit is before you sign.
Portability is cheaper to build in than to buy back.
Each of these steps costs little during initial design and a great deal once systems are in production. Our model-agnostic architecture work builds them in from the first release: stable task contracts, deterministic business logic, open tool protocols, portable data and a routing layer in the shared foundation.
The payoff is leverage.
Companies that can switch rarely have to. They negotiate better terms, adopt new capabilities faster and absorb a provider's outage or price change without a crisis.