Which AI vendor should we roll out to our employees?

We all know that the world of AI technology is moving fast, and that the companies that capitalise on that change are well positioned to outmanoeuvre their slower competitors.

Yet in many companies, especially mid-sized organisations, there has still not been a formal roll-out of a corporate licence for one of the leading AI vendors.

For many companies, the current situation is employees - from the factory floor to the boardroom - using a range of personal AI accounts, mostly free, to assist them in their work.

This gives the illusion that "we use AI" whilst failing to capitalise on the true potential of AI, and introducing security and data privacy issues.

Why are companies slow to roll out corporate accounts?

There are two primary reasons I hear when I speak to companies.

Firstly, it is because the senior leaders just don't know what a corporate account is, or what the implications are for their business.

And if they do know, the second reason is that things are moving so fast with so many new models, they have decision paralysis and are scared of making the wrong choice and messing up.

Both of these result in not moving forward - and if you aren't moving forward you are moving back.

What is a corporate account?

I use the phrase 'corporate account' to distinguish from a personal account that your employees have set up on their own.

They may log in with their work email address, but they set the account up, it is free or they pay with their personal funds, and the company has no control over what happens with that account.

Think of email. Imagine everyone in your company was asked to use their personal gmail.com or yahoo.com email address for work.

Your corporate data would be all over the place, there would be no consistency, no governance, and when an employee leaves they walk off continuing to use the same account they had for their job.

Of course we don't do this - we provide employees with a corporate email account, likely from Google or Microsoft, and with your company domain as the address.

This is exactly what a corporate AI account is like. For most companies the current scenario is that employees are using their choice of platform and can walk off with your company data when they leave.

With a corporate account you have control.

There are four main reasons you might do this

Which AI vendors should be on my shortlist?

Whilst there are a lot of niche vendors that may be a good choice for specific use cases in your industry, there are really three leading AI vendors to consider for your enterprise-wide roll-out:

1. OpenAI - and their ChatGPT models
2. Anthropic - and their Claude models
3. Google - and their Gemini models

These three are the leaders in the enterprise space and should be evaluated across a number of criteria.

I've created a summary table for you here:

Should we roll out only one vendor?

A traditional enterprise tech evaluation ends up with you picking one vendor - one ERP, one CRM, one HCM platform.

In this rapidly evolving market it is too risky to put all your eggs in one basket - the vendor you choose today might not be the best choice in just a few weeks time.

Instead I recommend you follow an A/B testing approach where you roll out (at least) two vendors.

1. Vendor A: 100% roll-out across your employees
2. Vendor B: 10% roll-out across your employees

i.e. if you are a company of 100 people, you would provide Vendor A to everyone, and then also provide Vendor B as a second option to ten people.

This allows you to see how those ten people that have access to both behave.

• Do they prefer one tool over the other?
• Do they gravitate towards specific features in Vendor B over Vendor A?
• Do they collaborate with each other in a different way in each model?

Which vendors should we pick?

The vendors you pick will depend on your individual situation, but let me give you some high level recommendations:

If you are a Google Workspace customer then it makes sense to roll-out Gemini as your primary model - it is already included in your Workspace licence fees and covered by your Google terms and conditions.

Then pick one of ChatGPT or Claude as your Vendor B. I would recommend Claude as your employees are probably already playing with ChatGPT so this is a valuable opportunity to learn about Claude.

If your company has a significant number of developers - either because you are a tech company, or a company building our digital products for your customers - then I would recommend Claude as your primary model as it is well regarded by developers as the leading coding platform.

And for everyone else, I'd recommend ChatGPT as your primary model - it is what most employees mean when they say they use AI - meaning you'll have the smoothest path to wide adoption.

If you'd like a deeper dive through this recommendation and the individual models, I've recorded a 15 minute video for you here:

How can Kowalah help me with this decision?

Within Kowalah we have a set of predfined tasks to help you with picking the right AI models to roll out to your employees.

Just head to Supplier Selection on your dashboard and select "Should we roll out one AI vendor or multiple?"

How can Kowalah help?

CIOs and IT leaders trust Kowalah's AI-powered platform to navigate complex AI procurement decisions with confidence, turning the fear of making costly mistakes into strategic advantage.

Chat with Kowalah to think through your AI strategy, develop your business case and pick the right vendors.

Create best practice documents, processes and policies to put your AI strategy on track.

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