The biggest insight from talking to 50+ enterprise AI leaders this quarter
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Spent a chunk of the last quarter talking to AI leads at mid-market and enterprise companies. The dominant insight surprised me.
The thing they're most worried about isn't model choice, cost, or compliance.
It's organisational. Specifically: 'how do we build internal capability so we're not dependent on a single vendor or a single internal hero?'
The companies winning aren't the ones with the best models. They're the ones who've built durable in-house AI literacy across product, engineering, and compliance teams.
What's the organisational shift you've seen work for AI adoption inside enterprise?
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As a former senior corporate executive, I can confirm that we were always seeking to eliminate the weakest link, when it comes to reliance on single vendor. Don't forget also that inside larger organisations, the barrier to entry is not just that your product is better, faster, cheaper but what it takes to transition from what everyone is used to, to what "could" be better for everyone. The incumbent is in a very strong position. I recall a situation where our accounting software vendor held us ransom for £12,000 so that they would keep our account on file for 5 years. Literally, we were renting disk storage space of about 1gb of storage space for 5 years to satisfy compliance. Find the pain point, offer a solution with little to no transition risk and you can close any deal. Price is never the most important in enterprise deals. (LOL... don't get me wrong, it was important, but never the red line).
@gerard_brandon Really appreciate the perspective Gerard, hearing it from someone who's actually sat on the buying side of these deals hits different. The "barrier to entry is not just being better, it's transition risk" point is honestly the sharpest way I've heard this framed. Every enterprise buyer is silently pricing in the pain of change, not the value of the switch.
The $12,000 disk storage story is hilarious and painfully true at the same time. Compliance-driven inertia is way underrated in AI adoption conversations right now. Everyone talks about model capability but the incumbent's grip is usually about "this is what our auditors already approved." Your line about finding the pain point and offering low-transition-risk solutions is exactly what we've had to build our whole positioning around.