Frontier Model Cost and Open-Weights Popularity is Driving Demand for Model Routing
Model routing is now a critical AI deployment strategy driven by frontier cost and open-weights competition
“A big goal of Glean is to avoid using LLMs for tasks where we don't need them. Sometimes you'll see queries in Glean where people are adding two numbers or multiplying two numbers. They could have used a calculator to do that.”
Model routing — dynamically selecting which AI model handles each task — is emerging as a core enterprise AI infrastructure layer, driven by frontier model costs and increasingly capable open-weight models like Kimi K3 and Qwen3. Stripe's $7B+ acquisition of OpenRouter and Glean's $300M ARR milestone (3x growth in 15 months) signal that intelligent model selection is now a billion-dollar market category. Glean's approach of avoiding LLMs entirely for simple tasks illustrates a maturing 'right model for the right job' philosophy taking hold in enterprise deployments.