I want to be direct about something that most enterprise AI evaluations treat as a secondary concern: a significant number of the AI vendors currently selling enterprise software will not exist in their current form in three years. Some will be acquired. Some will pivot to a different market. Some will run out of runway and shut down. The ones that survive will be the ones that have built something that is genuinely difficult to replicate and have found a customer base willing to pay for it at a sustainable price.
Figuring out which category your vendor falls into before you build significant organizational dependency on their product is one of the most practically important things you can do in an enterprise AI evaluation. It is also one of the things most evaluation frameworks spend the least time on.
Here is how I approach this assessment.
The business model test
The first question is whether the vendor has a business model that works at their current scale, not just at the scale they are projecting.
