Provider Concentration Exposure

Provider Concentration Exposure measures how much of an agency's client delivery depends on one model vendor's pricing, uptime, and roadmap. The framework scores each AI-backed workflow on three axes: share of requests routed to a single provider, cost sensitivity if that provider reprices, and recovery time if the API degrades or a model is retired. High exposure is not a technical problem, it is a retainer problem: a client deliverable that stalls because one endpoint changed terms is a margin and trust event. The concentration risk is structural, not hypothetical. OpenAI closed roughly $11 billion against a $30 billion target in its latest round, which constrains roadmap and pricing flexibility for every agency building on its API. Mitigation is cheap relative to the downside: route through a gateway layer such as Portkey or OpenRouter, keep a second provider warm, and document a fallback for each critical workflow before the client asks for one.