Your AI Supplier Needs an Exit Door
A grinning Renaissance merchant leaves a furious supplier behind, carrying his laptop and an unplugged cable. Made by Edward Frank Morris
Every magnificent hotel has an exit plan. Curiously, some businesses seem happy to build their entire AI operation inside a supplier's lobby and hope the doors never stick. Use ChatGPT to map dependencies and prepare a fallback while everything is still working.
Reuters reported pressure on AI-related shares on 16 October 2026, including concerns about infrastructure companies' debt. A falling share price does not prove that a service will fail. It is, however, a perfectly reasonable occasion to ask how exposed your operations are to any single provider.
Find the dependency hiding in the convenience
Start with one business-critical workflow. List the model service it uses, then identify where prompts and reference material are stored. Check what can be exported and which actions require a particular integration. The reassuring phrase 'we can always switch' becomes considerably less reassuring when nobody knows where the files are.
Using this workflow description and the supplied supplier documentation, draft a continuity plan. Identify single-provider dependencies and separate documented export options from assumptions. Describe a manual fallback and a candidate alternative. List what must be tested, who owns each step and what evidence would demonstrate recovery. Do not infer insolvency or outages from market prices.
Rehearse with the lights on
Ask ChatGPT to organise the findings into a short runbook. Let a colleague follow it using synthetic data. Can they retrieve the required inputs? Does the alternative produce an acceptable result? Record the time taken and any permissions that blocked the attempt.
Moving a prompt between models is not evidence that the workflow has moved successfully. Compare the result against your acceptance criteria, especially where tool use or structured output matters.
Keep a reviewed copy somewhere the affected service does not control. Update it when the workflow changes, and assign a human decision-maker for switching.
The point is operational resilience, not predicting tomorrow's share price. A good exit door is useful precisely because you would prefer never to need it.
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