Design Exit First: Lock-In and Portability Controls
Explore how to design AI acquisition strategies that prevent vendor lock-in by enforcing portability controls. This lesson guides you to specify exportable artifacts like prompt libraries and interaction logs, ensure knowledge transfer and training, and set measurable contract terms for exit support. You'll learn to turn marketing claims into enforceable requirements that secure government control and enable smooth transitions between AI vendors.
The M-25-22 scope and routing note can be clean and still leave a team trapped. The trap forms when a hosted GenAI pilot works well enough that people start depending on it, but the contract never made the working parts of that pilot portable. A vendor capability sheet often hides the problem in trusted words like easy migration and industry standard APIs, which sound like a promise even when they commit to nothing measurable.
A pilot team can collect weeks of useful prompts, outputs, and evaluations, then learn they cannot export them in a usable way. The vendor offers to help, but only through professional services on the vendor’s timeline. The bill arrives after the dependency is real. At that point, supervisors inherit a tool they cannot safely ...