Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian Says Most Enterprises Rent Their AI And Cannot Actually Switch Providers
CXOTalk, Thursday, September 3rd, 2026
Why AI Vendor Lock-In Is Already Here: Mozilla's CTO
Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian argues that most enterprises have already handed control of their AI to big platform companies, describing them as renters rather than owners because their AI is reached through API calls to outside systems.
He cites a Zapier survey in which roughly 85% of enterprises believed they could switch AI providers, but only about 30% managed it when they tried.
Krikorian records every coding prompt he runs so he can replay his real workload against a new model and decide with data whether a frontier model justifies its token bill.
His advice to CIOs and CTOs is to use several models, run some locally, and evaluate candidates on their own workloads rather than on vendor benchmarks.