How Dependent Is Your Business on Any One AI Tool?

OpenAI lost two senior leaders last week. Bill Peebles, who ran Sora, and their VP of AI for Science both departed. There wasn't much public explanation from either side.

I'm not going to tell you this means OpenAI is in trouble. It almost certainly doesn't. But it's a useful moment to think about something most businesses haven't gotten around to yet: what actually happens to your operations if the AI tool you're depending on changes significantly?

AI products change more than most people expect

This is just a fact about where the industry is right now. ChatGPT launched in late 2022 and has changed substantially every six months since. The same is true at Anthropic, Google, and everyone else building in this space. Features get added, pricing shifts, capabilities that existed one quarter get modified or removed in the next.

That's not a criticism of any of these companies. They're building something new and figuring it out as they go. But it does mean the AI tool you're using today might look pretty different in 12 months.

For most tasks, that's fine. If you use AI to draft emails or summarize meeting notes, you can swap tools with minimal disruption. The work still gets done.

The more interesting question is where you might be more exposed than that.

There's a difference between using AI and building on it

Think about it this way.

Using AI casually means you open ChatGPT or Claude, ask something, get an answer. If the tool changes or gets expensive tomorrow, you open a different one. No real disruption.

Building on AI looks different. Your client intake form runs through an AI workflow. Your team has learned to work with a specific tool's output format. Your weekly reports pull from a system that someone spent two months setting up. Now a change doesn't just affect you. It affects a process other people depend on, and untangling it takes real time.

Most small businesses I talk to are somewhere in the middle right now. They've added AI to a few workflows but haven't fully mapped what those workflows look like if something changes.

A simple way to check your own exposure

I don't think this needs to be a big exercise. Just pick the two or three AI tools your business relies on most and ask one question about each: if this tool disappeared or doubled in price tomorrow, how long would it take to recover?

For some tools, the answer is a few hours. You find an alternative, copy your prompts over, done. For others, the answer might be a few weeks. That gap between "a few hours" and "a few weeks" is where it's worth having some awareness.

If something is genuinely critical to your operations, it's also worth checking whether the provider offers any kind of service agreement or pricing stability for business users. Most of the major AI companies now have business-tier plans specifically because enterprise customers started asking these questions.

What the leadership changes actually signal

Senior people leaving AI companies is going to keep being a regular occurrence. These organizations are under real competitive pressure, moving fast, and making hard calls about direction constantly. Two departures in a week at OpenAI is notable but not unusual for a company at this stage.

What departures like this can signal is a shift in product direction. The people building these tools have specific ideas about where they're going. When those people leave, priorities can move.

That's worth watching, not worrying about. The practical response isn't to avoid AI tools. It's to stay reasonably informed about the products you're depending on, the same way you'd stay informed about any vendor that's core to how your business runs.

The businesses that are actively learning how AI fits into their work right now are building a real advantage. Waiting for the space to "settle down" before engaging is probably a longer wait than it sounds.

If you want a clear picture of where AI fits into your business and where your actual exposure is, a 90-minute AI Audit is a good place to start. No pressure to commit to anything. Just a clear map of what you're working with.