The AI industry is entering a major transition: value is shifting from owning the most powerful models to controlling how customers access, deploy and use them.
The presentation highlights an ecosystem spanning closed models such as OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, alongside open models including DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen and Llama.
Model marketplaces and routers are emerging as a new control layer, allowing customers to choose between multiple AI models rather than remaining locked into a single provider.
Hugging Face and OpenRouter illustrate this growing shift toward choice and interoperability.
At the application layer, companies such as Cursor, Perplexity, Harvey and Sierra are turning underlying models into specialized customer solutions.
This suggests that future competitive advantage may increasingly reside in applications, workflows, context and distribution—not models alone.
The presentation also makes another powerful point: some of the world’s largest technology companies, including NVIDIA and Apple, ultimately sell hardware. Hardware requires sophisticated channel capabilities spanning availability, pricing, contracts, configurations, vendor selection, currencies and energy requirements.
The message for the technology industry is clear: AI may be model-driven, but commercial success will be ecosystem-driven. As value moves closer to customers, channels, marketplaces and solution providers could become increasingly important in determining who ultimately controls the AI customer relationship.
