If you switched AI tools on Monday, what would you lose?
Most firms keep their AI context inside one vendor's product without deciding to. Why that matters, and how to keep your company memory portable.
3 min read Provecta Group
Suppose your main AI tool became unavailable to your company on Monday morning. A pricing change you cannot accept, a billing problem, an account suspended by mistake, a policy decision from your client that bans it. Pick whichever seems most likely for you.
What would you lose?
Not the subscription. You can buy another one by lunchtime. The question is what your team built up inside that tool over the last year and could not take with them. The custom instructions someone spent an afternoon on. The project folders with your templates. The memory the assistant built about your clients, your pricing and how you write. The long conversations that have quietly become the only record of how a process works.
For most firms the honest answer is "more than we would like", and nobody chose that. It accumulated.
How firms end up locked in
Every major assistant now keeps context inside its own product. Claude's memory is organised by project, inside Claude. Copilot's memory and company data sit inside Microsoft's estate. In January 2026 GitHub put agentic memory for Copilot into public preview, scoped to a code repository, inside GitHub. Each of these is sensible on its own terms. None of them is designed to be read by a competitor's tool.
Meanwhile, firms do not use one tool. A Zapier survey of US enterprise leaders published in late 2025 found 28% using more than ten AI applications. Smaller firms use fewer, but the pattern is the same: one person likes ChatGPT, the developers use something else, the finance team has whatever came with their accounting software. Each tool holds a different slice of what the company knows, and none of them can see the others.
So you end up with a company memory that is scattered across vendors, held in formats you cannot easily export, and partly invisible even to you.
Keep the memory in something you own
The alternative is simple to describe. Keep your company's rules, facts, decisions and voice in plain written files that the company owns, and treat every AI tool as a reader of those files, not the place they live.
Plain files have unexciting advantages. You can read them. You can see who changed what and when. You can back them up. And almost any AI tool can be pointed at them, whether by reading the folder directly, by an upload, or by pasting the relevant page.
We run Provecta this way. Our company memory is a set of documents we own, with a fixed opening routine that every AI working session follows: read the company context, the standards, the open next steps and risks, and the latest session notes, then start work.
On 11 July a session on Google's Gemini opened that memory and ran the same opening routine our other sessions follow on another vendor's model. Same files, same order, same starting point. To be accurate about it, that session only opened and did no further work. But it showed the thing we cared about: the memory did not belong to either vendor, and switching did not mean starting over.
The honest limits
Portability is not free. Tools that cannot read a folder directly need a copy uploaded or pasted, and copies go stale the moment the original changes. Someone has to own the refresh.
Plain files also need care with secrets. If your company memory sits in documents that get shared with several AI vendors, passwords, keys and payment details must stay out of it entirely. A memory that every tool can read is a memory every tool can leak.
And you still lose some things when you switch. Each assistant behaves differently, and prompts that work well on one may need adjusting on another. Owning the memory keeps the knowledge. It does not make the tools identical.
A twenty-minute exercise
List every AI tool your team uses, including the free ones people use on their own. For each one, write down what company information lives inside it that does not exist anywhere else: instructions, templates, memories, project files, important chats.
Anything on that list is something you would lose on Monday. Move the most important items into a shared document the company owns, and point the tools at the document instead.
Check your AI readiness at pgco.world/tools/ai-readiness.