The conclusion the sector's two largest companies reached in creating deployment ventures applies equally to small operations, and perhaps more: the bottleneck moved from the model to knowledge of the client's process.
While models were scarce and hard to access, privileged access was an advantage. With several competent models available, including open-weights ones runnable on your own hardware, that access stopped differentiating.
What differentiates now is knowing where the tool fits into a real operation, with undocumented processes, historical exceptions and legacy systems that don't expose the necessary data.
That knowledge isn't bought with a funding round or accelerated with more servers. It accumulates by working alongside the client, which favours whoever is already close.
For technology service providers with lean teams, that's the period's useful reading: the contest that matters isn't for model access, it's for understanding the client's business better than the next supplier.