Shark Week Special: The AI Ocean, Who Eats Who in the Enterprise AI Food Chain?

This article uses a 'Shark Week' metaphor to analyze the competitive dynamics of the enterprise AI market, arguing it is not a single market but an interconnected ecosystem of applications, model providers, data platforms, infrastructure, and facilities. It identifies key control points where value accumulates, such as user distribution, proprietary data, workflow authority, and infrastructure bottlenecks. The analysis covers major vendors including NVIDIA, Microsoft, OpenAI, Salesforce, and others, explaining how each competes across different layers. It advises enterprise buyers to understand which layers can be bundled and which dependencies must remain independent for strategic architecture decisions.