Before You Buy AI, Rehearse the Exit

The useful procurement question is not only what an AI system can do for your business. It is what your business can still do if you decide to leave it.

A successful demonstration shows an attractive destination. An exit rehearsal asks whether the business can take its work somewhere else without discovering, too late, that the important parts were never in the suitcase.

I would make that rehearsal part of buying one consequential workflow, before expanding a pilot or accepting a longer commitment. Not because every vendor is a trap, and not because moving should be free of effort. The purpose is to replace a vague promise of portability with evidence about a specific operating choice.

A model choice is not a portable workflow

On November 3, GitHub announced usage-API reporting that distinguishes local bring-your-own-key activity from enterprise custom models. Its notice also warns that local telemetry and token-reporting gaps can undercount usage; the named custom-model field is not backfilled into older reports. This is a useful, bounded improvement in reporting, not evidence that an organization's complete workflow can move to another platform.¹

The distinction matters beyond software development. Choosing a different model addresses one dependency. A business process may also depend on source records, field meanings, account permissions, tool behavior, approval history, scheduled work and unfinished exceptions. None of those becomes portable merely because the model menu has another option.

I separate three questions:

1. Can we retrieve the material? Identify the records, formats, versions and relationships that the business is entitled to export.
2. Can we rebuild the operating setup? Identify configuration, connections, identities and permissions that must be recreated or replaced.
3. Can we continue the work responsibly? Establish who owns open cases and whether the replacement preserves the decisions and limits that matter.

Those are three different demonstrations. A downloaded archive answers none of them completely on its own. Conversely, a system with proprietary internals may still support an acceptable exit if the organization can lawfully recover the material and rebuild the behavior it actually needs.

Specify what travels and what must be rebuilt

A concrete example comes from Microsoft's Power Automate documentation. It says an exported solution should include the components a flow uses, such as connection references, environment variables and tables. Its import guidance separately describes component ownership and the connection access needed to turn flows on. These are within-platform procedures, not a promise that another vendor can import the same workflow.²³

My inference is straightforward: ask the supplier and your own implementer to name the missing work, not just point to an Export button. A configuration file can reference an account you no longer control. A record can lose meaning when its identifiers no longer resolve. An imported process can acquire a different owner. The rehearsal should expose those possibilities before a production move is authorized.

Rights and implementation also need separate treatment. For in-scope EU switching, the Data Act's Article 29 ends switching charges from January 12, 2027, while distinguishing standard service fees and early-termination penalties. Article 30(1)'s functional-equivalence obligation concerns specified infrastructure services; it is not a universal promise that every SaaS or AI application must reproduce every feature elsewhere. The Commission's explanation preserves that distinction.⁴⁵

This is jurisdiction-specific context, not advice about your contract or a prediction of total migration cost. Ask a qualified adviser about applicability, exceptions and obligations. A legal right to switch does not by itself perform the technical work, retrain the team or establish that a replacement is acceptable.

For one proposed workflow, I would write an Exit Rehearsal Record with five entries:

• Recover: the records and digital assets needed, the right to use them, the usable format and the export route.
• Rebuild: the configuration, dependencies and permissions to recreate; anything unavailable or deliberately excluded.
• Carry forward: open obligations, case status, approved decisions and unresolved findings, with a receiving owner.
• Demonstrate: the cases and acceptance checks that the replacement must satisfy, including its stops and exceptions.
• Decide: the observed effort, remaining unknowns and person authorized to accept the dependency, narrow the scope or decline it.

Record who supplies each item and when the right to retrieve it ends. Keep credentials out of ordinary export bundles; arrange new access through the receiving environment's approved process. Do not export material merely because a button permits it. Ownership, permission and confidentiality still constrain the move.

Rehearse one replacement before committing

Consider an explicitly synthetic service business evaluating an assistant that prepares maintenance proposals. No real customer, price or measured migration result is represented here. The owner wants the option to replace the assistant later without losing the basis of outstanding proposals.

Begin in an isolated environment with fictional records. Prepare an ordinary request, an exception requiring an owner's judgment, and a request with conflicting source information. Record what the present candidate produces, what it refuses to do and what a reviewer needs to inspect. Then recover the authorized materials and recreate only that bounded preparation process in a second candidate environment.

Do not grade the replacement solely on whether its prose resembles the first draft. Ask whether the source references remain interpretable, the unresolved case remains unresolved, the approval boundary is still visible and the receiving owner can explain the next step. Keep sending, purchasing and record-changing actions disabled during the rehearsal. This is a test of preparedness, not permission to move live work.

Log the observed reconstruction work and the parts you could not test. Separate supplier charges from internal effort, parallel operation, retraining and specialist assistance. Do not substitute a guessed savings figure for an unknown input. A small rehearsal can reveal a dependency; it cannot establish the cost or reliability of migrating the whole organization.

A failed rehearsal need not disqualify a useful product. It can justify a narrower pilot, an agreed export deliverable, a different contract or an explicit decision to accept a dependency because its benefits warrant it. What should not survive is an unsupported assumption that switching models will automatically move the business.

Bring one question to the next buying conversation: before we rely on this workflow, can we show what leaving it would actually require? The best answer is not a reassuring sentence. It is a small, inspectable rehearsal with its limits still attached.