Prediction certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Foody: Enterprises will build evaluation systems to commoditize AI model providers

Brendan Foody · Mercor CEO: Why Application Layer Companies Have No Moat & The Cost of Hiring AI Researchers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jun 1, 2026 · at 44:16

Brendan Foody is the founder and CEO of Mercor. He predicts how enterprise customers will structure their internal AI evaluation infrastructure to avoid vendor lock-in.

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“And I believe that over time, this is going to develop to look very similar across every fortune, where they'll need to have this system of record for evaluating and specifying agent behavior across every workflow in their business. And they're going to use that to commoditize the model layer because they want to enable perfect competition at the, for the models, having zero switching costs.”

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