Most enterprises would automatically prioritize confidentiality of their data and design business workflows to maintain trade secrets. From an economic value point of view, especially considering how costly every model API call really is, exchanging selective access to your data for services or price offsets may be the right strategy. Rather than approaching model purchase/onboarding as a typical supplier/procurement exercise, think through the potential to realize mutual benefits in advancing your suppliers’ model and your business adoption of the model in tandem.
Second principle of AI: Boring by design
According to Information is Beautiful, in 2024 alone, 182 new generative AI models were introduced to the market. When GPT5 came into the market in 2025, many of the models from 12 to 24 months prior were rendered unavailable until subscription customers threatened to cancel. Their previously stable AI workflows were built on models that no longer worked. Their tech providers thought the customers would be excited about the newest models and did not realize the premium that business workflows place on stability. Video gamers are happy to upgrade their custom builds throughout the entire lifespan of the system components in their gaming rigs, and will upgrade the entire system just to play a newly released title.
However, behavior does not translate to business run rate operations. While many employees may use the latest models for document processing or generating content, back-office operations can’t sustain swapping a tech stack three times a week to keep up with the latest model drops. The back-office work is boring by design.
The most successful AI deployments have focused on deploying AI on business problems unique to their business, often running in the background to accelerate or augment mundane but mandated tasks. Relieving legal or expense audits from having to manually cross check individual reports but putting the final decision in a humans’ responsibility zone combines the best of both.
The important point is that none of these tasks require constant updates to the latest model to deliver that value. This is also an area where abstracting your business workflows from using direct model APIs can offer additional long-term stability while maintaining options to update or upgrade the underlying engines at the pace of your business.
Third principle of AI: Mini-van economics
The best way to avoid upside-down economics is to design systems to align to the users rather than vendor specs and benchmarks.
Too many businesses continue to fall into the trap of buying new gear or new cloud service types based on new supplier-led benchmarks rather than starting their AI journey from what their business can consume, at what pace, on the capabilities they have deployed today.
While Ferrari marketing is effective and those automobiles are truly magnificent, they drive the same speed through school zones and lack ample trunk space for groceries. Keep in mind that every remote server and model touched by a user layers on the costs and design for frugality by reconfiguring workflows to minimize spending on third-party services.