The Model You Love Today Might Not Exist Tomorrow
Remember Claude Fable 5? If you don’t, that’s the point. It was pulled offline over security concerns. Pricing structures shift overnight. The “best” AI model changes every few weeks.
If your entire operation is hardwired into one provider, you’re sitting on a ticking clock.
Stop Chasing Models. Start Building Context.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that Mike Kaput from SmarterX recently articulated: the competitive advantage is no longer which model you use — it’s the context you bring to it.
A capable model plus your specific context produces output that’s genuinely valuable. Swap the model, keep the context, and you keep moving. Swap the context, keep the model, and you’re starting from zero.
The Three Layers of Portable Context
Think of this as a briefing kit you can hand to any AI — today’s frontier model or tomorrow’s open-source upstart.
Layer 1: The “Read Me First” Document
A single orientation document that tells any AI tool how your team works. Think of it as onboarding docs for an AI collaborator. It covers:
- Your brand voice and tone guidelines
- Your target audience and their pain points
- Your product or service in plain language
- Non-negotiable style rules (things to always do, things to never do)
This document should be model-agnostic. Whether you’re using GPT, Claude, Gemini, or something that launches next month, the read-me-first doc stays the same.
Layer 2: Plain-Language Playbooks
Document your repeatable workflows as step-by-step playbooks. Not prompts — playbooks. The difference matters:
- A prompt says: “Write a launch email for our new feature”
- A playbook says: “Here’s how we write launch emails: we start with the customer pain point, use this specific structure, include these three elements, and always end with a single CTA. Here are three examples of emails we’ve sent before.”
Playbooks capture process knowledge, not just instructions. They’re what makes your AI output specific instead of generic.
Layer 3: Structured Data Access
Give AI tools safe, read-only access to your document storage and knowledge base. The governance principle here is critical: read-only access to sensitive accounts. Give AI the access it needs to be useful, not dangerous.
Your “Alpha” — The Secret Sauce
There’s a concept from Palantir called “alpha” — your proprietary advantage that makes generic AI output specific and valuable. Your alpha is:
- Your customer conversation logs and support tickets
- Your internal wikis and decision documents
- Your historical campaign data and what worked vs. what didn’t
- Your competitive intelligence notes
When you feed your alpha into any model, the output jumps from “decent” to “how did it know that?” That jump doesn’t come from the model. It comes from your context.
A 30-Minute Portability Test
Don’t wait for your current model to disappear. Test your portability today:
- Write one read-me-first doc (15 minutes). Plain text. Cover your brand, audience, and core rules.
- Document one workflow as a playbook (10 minutes). Pick something you do weekly — maybe how you brief blog posts or turn webinars into social content.
- Run a portability test (5 minutes). Take the same context to two different AI models. Give them the same task. Compare outputs.
If both models produce useful, on-brand output, you’ve built portable context. If one flops, your context needs work — not your model choice.
The Bottom Line
Models are interchangeable. Your context is not.
The teams that win in the next 12 months won’t be the ones who picked the “right” model. They’ll be the ones who built a context layer so rich and portable that any model can produce great work with it.
Start with one document. One playbook. One test. That’s all it takes to stop being dependent on a single AI provider — and start building an advantage that lasts.
