Are we sleepwalking into our next vendor lock-in?
We have done this twice already. First we rented the machine, and virtualisation licensing taught an entire industry what a renewal negotiation feels like when there is no alternative on the shelf.
Then we rented the architecture, and gained real speed in exchange for designs we could no longer walk away from. Europe eventually legislated an exit with cloud switching charges banned from January 2027. But the fee was only the visible lock-in. The APIs, the data formats and the identity binding are still there.
Now we are renting judgement, and the pattern is repeating faster than either wave before it.
This keynote looks at what each wave actually took from us, and why the exit cost has shifted from technical to organisational. It argues that the loud debate about model weights and jurisdiction is aimed at the most portable layer of the AI stack, while the layer that genuinely welds an organisation to a supplier, orchestration, tool definitions, retrieval, evals, observability, and the habits built around one assistant, goes largely unexamined.
It closes with three questions any team can answer this week: Where does it run? How much of the stack is open? How much visibility into the model do we actually need?
Andreas Prins is Global Head of Sovereign Solutions at SUSE, where he leads the company's work on digital sovereignty.
He advises governments and enterprises on operational autonomy, resilience, and the security of their software supply chains, and spends much of his time in closed-door briefings with executives and regulators who have to make these decisions under real constraints.
He speaks regularly at industry conferences on what sovereignty means in practice rather than in principle. He also trains leaders in Ethiopia work that keeps his view of leadership, transformation and team performance grounded in what organisations can actually operate.