What is BYO AI?

Every enterprise now has two AI conversations running at once. Procurement is negotiating enterprise terms with one or two model providers — data residency, retention, indemnities. Meanwhile every SaaS vendor is bolting AI onto its product under its own provider agreement. The result: a company that carefully negotiated one AI relationship discovers it actually has forty, one per tool, each with different terms.

BYO AI is the correction.

How it works

The enterprise supplies its own key — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google — and the platform routes its AI calls through the customer’s contract. The software’s reasoning is unchanged; the commercial and data relationship moves to paper the customer already governs. Spend lands on the customer’s AI agreement, usage is visible to the customer, and the provider terms are the ones their lawyers actually read.

What it changes — and what it must not

BYO AI changes the who: whose contract, whose keys, whose data terms. It must never change the how. Grounding in governed evidence, human review before action, audit logs, recorded overrides — these are architectural properties of the platform, and they apply identically whether the model runs on the vendor’s key or the customer’s. A platform that relaxes its controls when you bring your own key was never governing the AI — it was governing the invoice.

The questions to ask any vendor

• Which providers can I bring, and is there any feature difference when I do?
• Does my data ever touch the vendor’s own AI keys once mine are configured?
• Do the same review gates, logs and override records apply on my key?
• Can I see and meter the AI usage my key is paying for?

If the answers are crisp, AI deployment stops being a procurement exception and becomes what it should have been all along: a configuration choice.