The 11% Paradox - Why Orchestration Lock-In is Rewriting AI's Rules

Agentic Era Part 1 Revisited: How Mid-Year Data Supercharges Our Orchestration Thesis into a Lock-In Revolution

Credit: Planet Volumes

Despite model performance convergence and unprecedented ease of technical substitution, only 11% of enterprise builders switched AI providers in the past year. This striking statistic from Menlo Ventures' latest market data reveals a paradox that redefines our understanding of AI competition: switching is technically trivial but organizationally impossible. The explanation lies in the emergence of orchestration lock-in as the dominant force in AI markets.

Three months after publishing Part 1 of the Agentic Era series—where I first suggested orchestration as the new moat for LLMs—this empirical validation sharpens and extends our analysis in unexpected directions. In Part 1, I argued that the frontier AI race had shifted from model superiority to orchestration quality. The thesis was contrarian then—while the market still obsessed over benchmark scores and parameter counts, I emphasized the coordination layer between models and applications as the emerging source o…