Buying AI without buying a platform

Three commercial structures dominate this market and they are frequently described in the same language. The difference only becomes concrete at renewal, at exit, or when the vendor is acquired.

The six terms that decide it

• Termination effect. What happens to the running system if you stop paying? If the answer is that it stops, you bought a subscription, whatever the invoice says.
• Deployment location. Whose cloud account, whose region, whose identity provider. If it runs on theirs, portability is theoretical.
• Derived data ownership. Not just your source data. The resolved records, the labelled datasets, the patterns formed. This clause is often silent, and silence favours the vendor.
• Training rights. Whether your data may improve anything used by anyone else. Ask for an explicit prohibition, not an assurance in a call.
• Source escrow. Available on request in most serious engagements. Its absence is informative.
• Assignment on change of control. Who your counterparty becomes if the vendor is acquired, and whether pricing can be reset.

Questions that produce useful discomfort

If we terminate in month fourteen, what precisely stops working, and can you demonstrate that in a sandbox? Who owns the labels our team produced? If we hired a different firm to extend this next year, what would they need from you, and are you contractually obliged to provide it?

A vendor selling an asset answers these quickly. A vendor selling a subscription described as an asset does not.