Here's the procurement pattern we see most often in Irish businesses adopting AI for the first time. Someone gets enthusiastic about ChatGPT. IT runs a procurement process. Twelve months of ChatGPT Enterprise gets signed. Three months in, the team discovers Claude handles their document drafting better. Six months in, they're paying for two vendors. Or worse, they're tolerating the second-best model on half their workflows because changing is too painful.
It happens for understandable reasons. SaaS vendors sell single-product contracts because that's what their sales motion is set up to do. Finance prefers one bill in one currency. IT prefers one vendor to provision and audit. On day one, with one obvious use case, locking in looks rational.
The reason it ages badly is that the AI model landscape doesn't behave like the rest of enterprise software. Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini leapfrog each other quarterly. The Q1 winner on long-document reasoning isn't necessarily the Q3 winner on code generation. New model versions reset the comparison. Pricing changes. Provider partnerships shift. A team locked into one vendor feels every move; a team set up to switch doesn't.
What model-agnostic looks like in practice for a real team: one workspace your people sign into with Google or Microsoft SSO. Inside, every model your business has licensed is available, Claude alongside ChatGPT alongside Copilot. Power users run side-by-side comparisons for tasks where the right answer isn't obvious. A consistent prompt library, curated for your sector, surfaces in context across every model. Admins see who's using what. Switching the default model for a workflow is a config change, not a contract renegotiation.
This is what Nomad's Managed Seats product does. We work directly with Anthropic (where we're a Claude Builder Ambassador), OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. When a customer signs up, we agree the model mix based on their stack, their data residency, and their team's familiarity. The mix can change, without changing tier, without paying a switching fee, without re-negotiating anything. You see one Nomad bill in euro, one portal, one relationship. The complexity sits with us.
There's exactly one case where locking in is fine: you have a single well-defined workflow, the model that fits it is settled, and you're confident that won't change for the duration of the contract. Document summarisation for a chartered firm where Claude has been the right answer for two model versions in a row? Fine. The other 80% of Irish SME AI use cases are not that. They're emerging, they're multi-workflow, and they benefit from optionality. The right default in 2026 is to keep your options open until you've earned the right not to.
