Bread Financial’s executive vice-president and chief technology officer, Allegra Driscoll, prefers to keep AI vendor agreements short, often favouring one-year terms as the technology and market continue to shift.
Speaking to IT Brew, Driscoll said rapid change is one reason she wants the freedom to reassess suppliers more often. The point, she suggested, is not to chase every new tool, but to keep enough room to adapt as business needs, product offerings and technical capabi...
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lities evolve.
For Driscoll, who has spent roughly two decades negotiating software and AI agreements, the best supplier relationships are built on partnership rather than rigid purchasing. She described the ideal contract as one that reflects a collaborative, two-way relationship, where both sides are willing to adjust as circumstances change.
Flexibility, she said, is now a central issue in AI procurement. If a company wants shorter agreements, then a supplier that insists on longer lock-ins is unlikely to be the right fit. She also favours vendors willing to experiment in a lab environment before an enterprise rolls out a system more widely, arguing that hands-on testing can reveal much more than sales demonstrations.
A second priority is openness. Driscoll said companies need vendors that are prepared to share data and integrate into a broader architecture, because AI systems are most useful when they sit within a connected data environment. Without access to that wider ecosystem, the value of a single tool can be sharply limited.
Her comments come as many enterprises are becoming more cautious about dependence on a single AI provider. Technology publications including TechTarget and TechRadar have warned that vendor dependency can create resilience risks if access to a critical model or platform is restricted, disrupted or repriced. Their advice has centred on the same themes Driscoll raised: modular architectures, open standards, contractual exit routes and regular reassessment of whether a supplier still delivers enough value.
Driscoll also warned against a familiar mistake: letting the excitement around AI distract from the business problem that technology is meant to solve. In her view, companies can become fixated on adopting a particular product simply because it is popular, rather than asking whether it supports the underlying operational goal.
That discipline matters because, even when lock-in cannot be avoided entirely, it should be deliberate. Driscoll argued that some partnerships are worth keeping if they deliver important priorities at an acceptable cost and risk level. The key is to review that commitment regularly and decide whether it still makes sense as conditions change.
In areas that are strategically important, she said, firms may want to avoid reliance on a single provider altogether. Her preferred approach in those cases is a champion-challenger model, in which two vendors compete on the same objective. That, she said, gives the business more freedom to shift resources if performance, pricing or priorities change.
Elsewhere, companies may accept a degree of dependence, but only if they preserve the ability to revisit the arrangement. For Driscoll, the point is not to eliminate every tie to a vendor. It is to make those ties intentional, review them often and leave enough flexibility to move when the market moves first.
Source: Noah Wire Services
