The new AI lock-in
Recently PwC announced it will train and certify 30,000 staff on Anthropic’s Claude and build an Office of the CFO business around it for banking, insurance, and healthcare clients. Anthropic also recently committed $100 million to a partner network. Not to be outdone, OpenAI stood up the OpenAI Deployment Company, aka “DeployCo”, a new company backed by more than $4 billion in initial investment that sends forward-deployed engineers on-site to embed GPT models into customer workflows. For companies that supposedly sell tokens by the million, investing in low-scale, low-margin professional services could seem like a curious way to spend money. But it’s not curious at all. It’s the tell. Even as models get easier to swap, the work that surrounds them is not. Developers already move among Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and local models with less ceremony than vendors would like. At the API layer, substitution is getting easier, too. Not effortless or free, but easier than replacing the work