Managed AI platforms trade one lock-in for another
A 2026 survey of 100 enterprise CIOs found 37% now run five or more AI models in production, up from 29% the year before. A separate Zapier survey of enterprise leaders, published the same year, found 81% at least somewhat worried about depending too heavily on one AI vendor, and 47% said losing their primary vendor would disrupt a real business function. That fear is exactly what "model platforms" like Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI Service, and Google's Vertex AI Model Garden are sold as the fix for: one integration, many models, switch providers without rewriting your app.
It's a good pitch. It's also not quite true. Routing your calls through a hyperscaler's managed layer doesn't remove a dependency, it relocates one. You stop depending on a single model provider and start depending on a single cloud provider instead, and that second dependency is usually stickier than the first.