AI-First Organization / Session 07 / AI Sovereignty & Vendor Risk
The Sovereignty Dial: How Much of Your AI Stack Should You Actually Own?
About this session
Every AI-first company is building on rented ground. The model you architected around gets retired. The price of inference changes on someone else's schedule. And the business intelligence that makes you different from your competitors is the exact thing you have to hand over in order to use any of it.
Don Shin has been shipping software through every platform shift since Netscape 1.1 — web, mobile, AR/VR, IoT, and now LLMs. He argues that most companies have no Plan B, and that "AI sovereignty" is not a geopolitical abstraction but a practical business question: how much of your stack, your costs, and your data do you actually control?
Austen and Don get into why sovereignty is a dial rather than a switch, what the cheapest first turn of that dial looks like, and why a fine-tuned small model can beat a frontier model on your specific task at a fraction of the cost.
In this session
- Why “AI sovereignty” is a practical business question, not a geopolitical abstraction: how much of your stack, your costs, and your data you actually control
- Why sovereignty is a dial rather than a switch, and what the cheapest first turn of that dial looks like
- Why a fine-tuned small model can beat a frontier model on your specific task at a fraction of the cost
- The hidden cost of building on rented ground: the model you architected around gets retired, and the price of inference changes on someone else’s schedule
- Why the business intelligence that sets you apart is the exact thing you hand over to use any of it, and why most companies have no Plan B
- Lessons from shipping through every platform shift since Netscape 1.1 — web, mobile, AR/VR, IoT, and now LLMs
About the speakers
Austen Allred, Host. Founder and CEO of Gauntlet AI, where several times a year cohorts of engineers are flown to Austin — costs covered — to get to the cutting edge of AI, alongside corporate trainings that bring entire product pods and teams through the same immersion. Previously founded Lambda School (later BloomTech), and has spent the past decade building education companies that move people to the frontier of how software gets built. Connect with Speaker
Don Shin, Guest. Don Shin is the founder and CEO of CrossComm, a Durham, NC consultancy he started in 1998 that has built products through every platform shift since Netscape 1.1 — web, mobile, augmented and virtual reality, IoT, and now large language models. Over the past two years CrossComm has moved increasingly into AI strategy and roadmapping, fractional chief-AI-officer advisory, and AI agent planning, deployment, and governance. The firm was named Minority Technology Firm of the Year by the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Don speaks regularly on AI ethics, small language models, and AI sovereignty. Connect with Speaker