Foundation Model Vendor Strategy: What Enterprise SLAs Actually Guarantee
Enterprise teams pick LLM vendors based on benchmarks and demos. Then they hit production and discover what the SLA actually says — which is usually much less than they assumed. The 99.9% uptime guarantee you negotiated doesn't cover latency. The data processing agreement your legal team signed doesn't prohibit training on your inputs unless you explicitly added that clause. And the vendor concentration risk that nobody quantified becomes painfully obvious when your core product is down for four hours because a telemetry deployment cascaded through a Kubernetes control plane.
This is not a procurement problem. It's an engineering problem that procurement can't solve alone. The people who build AI systems need to understand what these contracts actually say — and what they don't.
