Model provider

A model provider develops an AI model and makes it available for products to use. The firm may buy an AI product from one company while another supplies a model it uses. A change or outage at that model provider can affect the product, even though the firm bought it from a different vendor.

Imagine a firm uses one product for meeting notes and another to help draft suitability reports. One morning, notes stop arriving and report drafts fail too. The firm's fallbacks are to write up recordings and draft reports from its template, but doing both at once delays the paraplanners' work. Both vendors confirm they rely on the same model provider, which has an outage.

The firm had separate fallbacks for each product, but their shared dependency makes both fallbacks necessary on the same day. A supplier list naming only the two vendors would miss that connection. The firm can ask each vendor which model provider it uses, who runs the model, and what happens to the product if that provider is unavailable. The provider's name alone does not tell the firm where client data is held or which company can see it.