Summary
- A model provider is one layer in a product; data, orchestration, review and recovery remain the customer’s responsibility.
- Procurement should test export, substitution and degraded operation before a critical workflow depends on one service.
OpenAI provides models and tools that organisations can place inside products and internal workflows. The operational question is not only model quality. It is what happens when price, limits, behaviour or availability changes. Teams should keep their own test set, separate business rules from provider-specific calls, log consequential outputs and define a manual mode. A credible adoption decision includes a timed substitution exercise. Portability need not mean identical results, but it should prevent one external service from becoming an invisible single point of failure.
