An AI Future Without the Lock-In — Remy Guercio, Tailscale

Remy Guercio of Tailscale argues that the era of unlimited AI budgets is over and that teams need to escape lock-in while proving real ROI. He breaks an internal AI deployment into four layers (models, data connectors, interfaces, and sandboxes) and presents an AI gateway as the way to keep each layer swappable. He demonstrates how Tailscale's Aperture uses tailnet identity instead of shared API keys, sets per-model budgets, serves as both an LLM and MCP gateway, centralizes authentication for coding agents, and provides logs for diagnosing agent behavior.