Keep ownership of the work
How to avoid tying your business knowledge to one AI supplier
AI vendor lock-in arises when changing a supplier would require rebuilding important parts of your information or workflow. Keep the business knowledge, rules and tests understandable outside the supplier’s product. Then test a small export and replacement before depending on the system for essential work.
Preserve business records, rules and tests in usable forms, and treat a supplier change as a tested implementation rather than a guaranteed simple swap.
Identify what the supplier holds for you
List source documents, structured records, identifiers, permissions, prompts, workflow rules and evaluation examples. Add logs or review decisions needed to explain past work. Establish which are your records, where they live and what an export contains.
A download of original documents may omit the relationships and reviewed decisions added inside the system. Those can be the parts that explain how your business works. Keep them visible in the ownership inventory.
The GOV.UK purchasing-strategy guidance includes ownership of code and business rules in technology buying decisions. For a private service firm, use that as a prompt to clarify ownership in the actual arrangement.
Export meaning as well as files
| Item | Information needed for reuse |
|---|---|
| Business records | Stable identifiers, client identity and source origin. |
| Provenance | Validity start, validity end and collection date as separate fields. |
| Relationships | The linked records and the meaning of each relationship. |
| Permissions | Who may use which information, with a trusted identity mapping. |
| Workflow rules | Inputs, permitted actions, approval and exception behaviour. |
| Tests | Expected results, supporting evidence and recorded limitations. |
Said describes provenance as what makes the knowledge build useful: an agent needs the evidence and its dates, and a human needs to inspect it. Losing those fields during export can leave the text readable while the original review rules are no longer possible.
Prefer documented formats your team can inspect and validate. A JSON or CSV file is only useful if the fields, identifiers and meanings are explained. Keep an example that another person can reconstruct.
Keep the supplier connection separate from business rules
An adapter can translate a request into a supplier’s API format while the business rules remain in your own workflow. The knowledge-base sample illustrates that separation with deterministic checks and an optional local model adapter.
That design makes a change easier to reason about, but it does not establish that models are interchangeable. Different models may follow instructions differently, use different context limits or produce different tool calls. Retest the behaviour you depend on.
Keep supplier-specific features in the dependency inventory. Document where the workflow relies on a hosted search index, proprietary automation or a particular output format. Decide which dependencies are acceptable for the value they provide.
Test a small export and replacement
Export one approved set of synthetic or authorised records. Reconstruct the chosen question in a separate test environment, then check the identifiers, sources, dates and access rules. Record what did not transfer.
Run the same evaluation examples after a model or supplier change. Inspect normal answers, refusals, conflicting evidence and actions. Include the time and cost of rebuilding connectors or indexes in the decision.
Check current export, deletion, access and termination terms directly with the supplier’s documentation and your agreement. This guide provides questions to ask; it does not assert a specific provider’s contractual terms.
Keep a record of what can move
Worked example
Moving a structured reporting answer
Invented teaching example. No client outcome is claimed.
PRESERVE
Invented reporting facts, client IDs, source origin, quotations and separate validity and collection dates.
RECONSTRUCT
Load the records into a test application and apply the same client and date checks.
RETEST
Current answer, expired record, conflicting sources and wrong-client request.
LIMIT
A successful structured-data export does not prove that an entire production system can be moved without additional work.
Further reading
Written by Said Lopez, founder of LeverageAI and author of Lean AI. Our guides draw on the method in the book and our work with clients.