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Rafael Cordeiro, colunista

Technological independence does not mean having no vendors

Rafael Cordeiro · 2 min read
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Independence, for a company, does not mean having no vendors. It means no longer being held hostage by them.

Brazil's Independence Day, September 7, is a good moment to think about a less obvious form of sovereignty, the technological kind.

The invisible dependency of SaaS

Over the past two decades, buying off-the-shelf software was almost always the most rational decision.

SaaS sped up digitization, lowered upfront investment and gave companies access to technologies they would have struggled to build on their own.

But that convenience also created an invisible dependency. Processes, integrations, data and business rules became locked into systems the company does not control, and that only evolve when they make it onto another company's roadmap.

AI coding changes the equation

AI coding is starting to change that equation.

In a case published by OpenAI, loveholidays went from 7% to 79% of AI-assisted code changes and increased its deployment frequency by 73% without growing its engineering team.

In another experiment, a small OpenAI team built with agents an internal product of roughly one million lines of code, estimating it did the work in a tenth of the time the traditional method would have taken.

These are signs that the line between buying and building software is being redrawn.

Independence is not self-sufficiency

That does not mean rebuilding every ERP, CRM or productivity tool. Independence is not self-sufficiency.

It means buying what is a commodity, but keeping control of what represents the intelligence of the business.

  • The data.
  • Operational knowledge.
  • Decision rules.
  • The workflows that set the company apart.
  • The code and the tests.
  • The ability to switch models, agents, clouds and vendors.

When that foundation belongs to the company, software stops being a rigid structure rented from third parties and becomes a layer that can be continuously rebuilt on top of its own knowledge.

Vendors still exist. But they stop owning the operational intelligence and become replaceable components of a larger architecture.

The new business independence

This may be the new business independence. Being able to evolve your own operation without waiting for another company's roadmap, contract or development queue.

The question remains. If a critical vendor doubled its price or disappeared tomorrow, how much of your operation could your company rebuild, and how much of the business's intelligence truly belongs to it?

In short

  • Independence does not mean having no vendors. It means no longer being held hostage by them.
  • Buy what is a commodity and keep control of the intelligence of the business.
  • Vendors become replaceable components of a larger architecture.

Further reading

Originally published on LinkedIn on September 7, 2026. See the original post. This version has been revised and expanded with context and sources. The views are those of the author, a co-founder of OperOS AI.

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