The 58 Percent: What Series B Founders Should Renegotiate Before Q3
Series B founders signed AI vendor contracts assuming they could switch later. New survey data shows 58% of enterprises that tried to switch failed, and the platform giants just rewrote the lock-in math in the same week. Here is the renegotiation playbook to run before Q3.
TLDR Series B teams signed AI vendor contracts in 2025 assuming they could switch later. The Register reported this week that 58 percent of enterprises that actually tried to switch failed or burned far more effort than expected. Three platform giants just rewrote the lock-in math in the same window, which means the renegotiation conversation is happening with or without participation from the buyer side. The problem this solves I have been collecting AI vendor contracts that Series B founders signed in 2025 the way some people collect bad first drafts. They mostly look the same. A one-year deal with annual prepay, a usage cap that felt generous at the time, and an exit clause that says “30 days written notice.” The founder I was talking to last week pointed at his and said “we’re fine, we can switch if we need to.” I asked if his team had ever moved an AI workload from one vendor to another. He said no. That is the problem this article solves. The Register published a piece on April 28 showing that the gap between believing a switch is possible and actually completing one is enormous, and Q2 is when most renewal conversations open. The approach Five moves, in order, before the next renewal touches the inbox. Inventory what is contracted versus what is actually running. Pull every active AI contract. Then have an engineer pull every API key and SDK reference in the production codebase. The two lists will not match. They never do. The delta is the shadow vendor footprint, and it is the part that breaks during migration. Do this in a two-hour working session before any other step. Score each vendor on three axes: model, orchestration, state. Model is the easy one to swap, in theory. Orchestration (workflow logic, prompt templates, eval harness ) is medium-hard. State (memory, fine-tuned weights, conversation history, tool integrations) is what locks the team in. A vendor scoring high on all three is not interchangeable. Treat it like a database, not a tool. Renegotiat