Your Vendor Updated Their Model Overnight. Now What?

One morning your AI tool starts answering differently. Nobody changed your settings. Your vendor just updated their model overnight, and now the outputs your team relied on have shifted.

This happens constantly. AI models get retrained, tuned, and replaced far more often than traditional software gets updated. Each change can alter tone, accuracy, and behavior in ways the release notes don't fully capture. Your workflow didn't change. The ground under it did.

So ask your vendor three things before this surprises you. First: will you tell us before you update the model, or only after? Second: can we pin to a specific version while we test the new one? Third: what testing do you run to make sure the update doesn't break existing uses?

Then do your own part. Keep a small set of test prompts — ten representative tasks your team runs every week. Run them after every vendor update and compare. If the answers drift, you'll catch it in minutes instead of discovering it in a customer complaint.

You can't stop vendors from improving their product. You can insist on knowing when the product you're relying on becomes a different product.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.