12 models, one daily driver: OpenRouter's Peter Walker on how teams choose AI

Applied Wizardry · Oct 22, 2026 · 55m

Peter Walker, Head of Insights at OpenRouter and previously at Carta, sees how about 120,000 US organisations use AI models every day. He expected their usage to spread across models. Instead, the typical organisation now uses about 12 models a month, with one daily driver taking most of the tokens and specialists around it. He and Yaniv get into why, in his view, the same model can get opposite reviews depending on who serves it, how cache rates quietly set the bill for agent workloads, why writing quality pushed Yaniv from Claude loyalty to using OpenAI too, and whether open-weight models…