Vendor Lock-In in AI

Lock-in in AI rarely announces itself. It accumulates through ordinary decisions: prompts authored in a provider's console because that was convenient, embeddings generated by a provider's model and stored in a provider's vector store, conversation history retained under a provider's retention policy. Each is reasonable alone, and together they mean a provider change requires rewriting the logic, rebuilding the index and abandoning the history. The cost is invisible until the moment it is needed — a pricing change, a terms revision, a capability gap — which is the moment the organization discovers its options are narrower than it believed.

Centralpoint locates each of those assets on the organization's side. Prompts and skills are records in its own SQL environment with version history; the vector index is built and held locally; interaction logs and dialogue history are records subject to the organization's own retention. 451 Research noted this as the basis of the model-agnostic position: the business logic is portable because it was never stored in a model provider's system.