The Dependency Threshold
The technology update sounds like unqualified good news while one provider carries more of the business each quarter: set the point at which that reliance becomes a board conversation.
Scope. About 8-page playbook: threshold method, stress-test protocol, trigger wiring and a worksheet. Governance toolkit: practitioner-designed, for use in your context.
The technology update is three slides. The CEO delivers the last one with a smile: AI now handles 40% of customer volume, which makes the company the most cost-efficient operator in the market. On strategy, with a great partner. The board notes it. The chair says well done. The agenda moves on. Nobody asks when the board approved depending on a single outside provider for that much of the business.
A threshold that fires while the board still has choices
The Dependency Threshold is the mechanism that sets, in advance, the point at which concentration on a single AI provider becomes a board conversation — by spend, by volume, or by share of a revenue-affecting function. It gives the board the means to fix that threshold before the dependency forms, the stress-test question that reveals whether a fallback is real or merely documented, and the trigger wiring that brings the concentration to the board while the company still has choices.
A threshold set in advance controls the exposure. A threshold set after the dependency has formed only describes it. This playbook is the difference between the two.
Use it by agreeing the threshold measure for your business, running the stress test on each material provider, and wiring the trigger into the board's reporting.
Set it, test it, read for it, wire it
- A method for setting the threshold on the right measure for your business
- A stress-test protocol that establishes what a tested fallback actually requires
- A reading-for-the-gap discipline for interpreting a good-news slide
- The trigger and reporting wiring that routes a breach to the board in time to act
- The two director-level exposures the dependency carries, framed as governance checks
- A worksheet: your threshold register, stress tests, and governance checks
Before the dependency becomes material
Built for the boards that carry the exposure
Written for the risk committee chair who needs the threshold and the trigger in a deployable form. It also serves full boards that carry the concentration exposure, and CFOs close to the vendor economics, for whom the dependency question is also a cost-model and resilience question.
Concentration reaches the board in time
You'll set a concentration threshold the board agreed in advance, on the measure that fits the business, and know what a real answer to the stress-test question requires. You'll read an efficiency slide for the dependency it hides, and the trigger brings concentration to the board while the choices are still open.
A practitioner-designed toolkit to be applied in your own context.
The Dependency Threshold
Catalogue No. 07 · €[PRICE] · Digital delivery