Enterprise LLM Vendor Selection and Consumption Models

Narrative

The academic and arXiv landscape for enterprise LLM vendor selection remains surprisingly sparse as of mid-2026. Only three peer-reviewed or preprint sources directly address the intersection of LLM evaluation and enterprise procurement decisions. The Zhang et al. (2025) NAACL Industry Track paper stands out as the most directly relevant, proposing a framework spanning 25 domain-specific benchmarks across financial services, legal, climate, and cybersecurity—sectors where vendor selection criteria extend beyond task accuracy to regulatory compliance and domain expertise. The TechRxiv and arXiv papers shift evaluation frameworks beyond static benchmarking into continuous, multidimensional validation covering latency, privacy, energy efficiency, and hallucination risk—dimensions that enterprises care about but which traditional academic benchmarks (MMLU, GSM8K) do not capture. Notably absent from this lane are formal studies of vendor lock-in, SLA structures, procurement decision-making processes, consumption patterns across cloud platforms versus direct APIs, or empirical analysis of how enterprise teams actually weight model quality against availability, pricing, and governance. The silence suggests that either such research is happening in industry labs (not yet published) or that the question itself remains primarily a practitioner and investor concern rather than an academic research priority. The few sources present are industry-track papers, indicating that this topic is only beginning to transition from business intelligence into peer-reviewed research domains.