The other day I switched AI models in the middle of a job. From one to another, no drama. And while I was doing it I realized something: the only thing that didn’t change was me. Or rather, what’s mine.

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I’ve been selling travel since 1982. I’ve watched a lot of tools come and go: the telex, the fax, the first computer in the agency, the internet, the mobile phone. Each one looked like the revolution. But they all had one thing in common: they were things you went to. A machine, a website, a program. You went in, did your thing, came out.

AI started the same way. A website you went to with a question. A chat that answered with more or less charm. That’s how I used it at first, like almost everyone.

That’s over. AI is no longer a place I go to. It’s inside everything I already use to work. In the email, in the spreadsheet, in the place where I write, in the team chat. I don’t go looking for it. It’s there, reading the context, suggesting, executing. It stopped being a tool you pick up. It became infrastructure, like the electricity or the water.

And when something becomes infrastructure, the question changes.

The question that matters is no longer which one is best

Every month a new model shows up. One releases a more powerful generation, another answers the following week, a third appears claiming to combine them all. It’s a show. And it’s easy to lose your head chasing which one is best this month.

I’ve learned not to play that game. Because this month’s best won’t be next month’s best. And if you marry one of them, the day the wind changes you’re left stranded.

The real question is a different one: who owns the way you work?

I’m not talking about your loose files. I’m talking about what truly matters in a 42-year-old business: that “we already tried this and it didn’t work,” that “this client always wants the quote done this way,” that “Fridays have an exception,” that “this price is not up for negotiation,” that “this trip turns out well because someone checks it before it goes out.” That’s not documents. It’s the memory of how the house runs.

If all that memory lives inside one provider — whichever it is — the day you want to switch AI you find out you can’t. Not because the other model is worse, but because you left the soul of the business inside a box that isn’t yours.

The rule, in one line

I put it to myself like this, and it’s the rule of this blog:

Rent the intelligence. But own your context.

Use the best model there is this month. No regrets. It’s a horse you hitch today and swap tomorrow. But your memory, your processes, your way of deciding, your important conversations — all of that — keep it somewhere you control.

In my case that’s very concrete. I don’t code, I’ve said it before. I ask. But what I ask gets stored on my own machines, in my own brain of files, synced, organized my way. The model that reads it can be one today and another three months from now. What it reads doesn’t move. It’s mine.

That’s why I could switch AI in the middle of a job without anything falling over. The new one walked into a house already built, the memory already in place, the rules already written. It didn’t have to learn who I am from scratch. It found it done.

What you pay without seeing it

There’s another part of this that almost nobody looks at, and which caught my eye — me, who’s been doing the sums my whole life.

AI doesn’t live in some abstract cloud. It lives in chips, in memory, in huge data centers, in energy, in cables. And those centers compete for the same materials as your next computer or your next phone. When demand for AI shoots up, that cost doesn’t disappear: it shows up on the bill. In the price of the device, in the price of using the service, somewhere.

So this thing that looks like free magic gets paid for. It always gets paid for. And it’s worth not forgetting that when someone promises you everything will be free forever.

What I would do

I’m not going to give you seven tips. I’ll leave you just one, the one that really matters:

Start today taking your context out of the closed platforms. Your processes, your decisions, your way of working — write them down somewhere that’s yours. Even by hand. Even little by little.

The intelligence you’ll always be able to change. There’ll be a better one next month, and the one after, and the one after that.

The context, if you lose it, doesn’t come back.