The Cost of Switching: An AI Lock-In Experiment
What happens when you try to walk away from the AI you’ve been using every day for two years?
This six-part series explores my personal attempt to switch from ChatGPT to Claude and/or Google Gemini. On the surface, the costs seem small, just $20/month per subscription. All three of the services have a $20 plan that gives you much more than the free version without breaking the bank. But the real price showed up in hidden places: the technical work of moving data, the cognitive effort of relearning a new tool, and the trust I had built with my existing workflow.
Alongside my story, I’ll weave in research on AI adoption, trust gaps, market fragmentation, and organizational inertia. Together, these posts offer a window into why vendor lock-in is so powerful in the AI era and what it means for individuals and organizations navigating this.
My working outline:
The Experiment: Can You Really Switch AI Tools?
The Illusion of Portability
Trust and the “AI Fluency” Lock-In
Fragmentation vs. Convergence: Too Many Choices
The Organizational Dimension: Shadow IT and Inertia
So, Was the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
