Forget About Frontier Models (For Workflow Automation)
Why waiting for the next model drop is delaying your AI transformation and creating strategic risk
Everyone is waiting for the next model drop.
This is the Osborne Effect playing out in AI: organisations are putting off automation today because they believe a future "frontier" model will arrive that solves everything out of the box. That belief is not just misguided—it actively delays transformation and creates strategic risk.
Automation Isn't About Intelligence. It's About Verification.
It doesn't matter if GPT-6 is 2x, 10x, or 100x smarter than today's models. If you can't test, evaluate, and monitor your workflows, you can't deploy them.
Real AI automation requires:
- A suite of evals to verify behaviour before deployment.
- Continuous feedback loops to capture edge cases from real users.
- Incremental versioning to improve your system without breaking production.
Frontier models don't fix these requirements. They amplify them.
The Hidden Cost of Frontier Models
Most people don't realise how rapidly frontier models change behind the scenes. Providers quietly adjust weights, safety layers, prompting rules, and tokenisation strategies. What works today might fail tomorrow—without warning.
This leads to:
- Broken workflows
- Regression in performance
- Loss of trust across stakeholders
When you build your automation pipeline on shifting sand, you are not building a product. You're participating in a demo ecosystem.
Open Source Models Are Already Good Enough
There is already enough intelligence in today's open-source models to automate the majority of business operations—especially structured workflows like customer service, eligibility checks, scheduling, invoicing, and policy lookups.
The bottleneck is not the IQ of the model. It's the absence of:
- Clear success criteria
- Robust eval coverage
- A delivery model that supports version control and iteration
Go Live Early. Learn Faster. Expand Confidently.
By starting with a stable, open-weight model:
- You gain full control over behaviour.
- You capture real-world edge cases from day one.
- You build proprietary advantage through your data and evals—not someone else's frontier model roadmap.
This is how you build AI automation that gets smarter over time, not riskier.
Don't wait for the future to arrive. Take control of it.
At our consulting practice in Perth, Western Australia, we help companies manage this change. We design evaluation systems that fit their unique needs and goals. If you're creating your first AI app or want to improve current ones, we can talk about how systematic AI quality assurance can boost your competitive edge.
Email us at: hello@verticalai.com.au
Visit our website at: https://verticalai.com.au