Enterprise AI customers face vendor lock-in and price increases as switching between platforms proves harder than expected

A Zapier survey of 542 US executives found that while nearly 90 percent believed they could switch AI vendors within four weeks, only 42 percent of organizations that actually attempted migration reported it went smoothly; the remaining 58 percent said the process either failed outright or required significantly more effort than expected.

AI implementations create vendor-specific dependencies through proprietary APIs, custom training data, vendor-specific tooling for model deployment, and deep integrations into existing workflows that do not transfer cleanly between providers. Switching also requires moving context, workflows, and institutional memory—areas most operators have not documented.

OpenAI increased the cost for developers using GPT-5.2 from $1.25 per input token in GPT-5.1 to $5.75. Anthropic confirmed a de facto price increase for Claude enterprise edition on April 15, 2026, moving from fixed pricing to a dynamic usage-based model. GitHub also restricted Copilot availability and compute access while dropping Opus model support.