Intelligence Migration is NOT Possible
Over the last year, I have had 760 conversations in my Claude account. Almost 2 per day. Another 300 in Perplexity. Over a year of asking questions, refining prompts, building context. Between Claude, Perplexity, and WisprFlow, my AI stack feels very complete, and competent.
Earlier today someone asked me to try Grok. My reaction was almost rude. I straight up refused. Not because Grok is bad. I am happy to try new models, but for personal use, I always defaulted to Claude. Not sure if it's the UX, or because Claude "knows me" now. It has my taste. My preferences. The way I think through problems.
Starting over with a new LLM feels like explaining yourself to a stranger when your best friend already gets you.
Click Anywhere To Build Context
Every founder, operator I have met over the last few months has picked their LLM chat app. ChatGPT people. Claude people. Grok people. And none of them want to switch.
The inertia to move is massive. If that's how I feel about switching chat apps, imagine how enterprises feel about switching AI platforms. The switching cost isn't money. It's accumulated "intelligence".
The system knows you and in case of enterprise - the workflows. It has context you didn't explicitly provide but built up over hundreds of interactions. Now multiply that resistance by a thousand. That's what enterprise AI switching costs look like.
Introducing Enterprise Vendor Lock-in In the AI Era
Organizations tend to believe that they are not locked in because Salesforce lets them bring their own LLM key. ServiceNow too. HubSpot. Bring your own foundational model. Closed source. Open Source. SLM. LLM. Anything.
"We control the model," they say. "We can switch anytime."
No. You can't.
The foundation model is just the execution layer. Your enterprise intelligence lives in the vendor's orchestration—the layer that decides what information matters when, how documents relate, how chunking is done, which policies override others.
You uploaded SOPs, customer histories, institutional knowledge. The vendor transformed this into "understanding". That understanding is encoded in their proprietary semantic layer. Their retrieval logic. Their orchestration engine.
"You kept the engine. They kept the car."
No Such Thing As Migrating Intelligence
Here's the real test: If your vendor raised prices 40% next year, could you actually leave? In 2021, moving from HubSpot to Salesforce was brute force. In 2025, moving intelligence layers is an existential reset.
The Litmus Test
The question isn't whether to use AI. It's whether you'll own the intelligence you build, or spend the next decade paying rent to whoever got there first.
Ask your vendor: "Can you export not just your data, but the intelligence layer—all the learned relationships, orchestration logic, and reasoning patterns?"
If the answer is no, you're building equity in someone else's platform.
Vivek Khandelwal
2X founder who has built multiple companies in the last 15 years. He bootstrapped iZooto to $5M ARR. IIT Bombay graduate with deep experience in product marketing, GTM strategy, and scaling B2B SaaS. Mentors early-stage startups at Upekkha, and SGx. At CogniSwitch, he leads business development and partnerships.