The four questions that sort AI vendors in an afternoon

Every regulated firm now takes meetings it would not have taken two years ago. The decks are polished, the demonstrations are impressive, and the partners around the table privately admit they cannot tell the serious suppliers from the theatre. The good news: you do not need to understand the technology to sort them. You need four questions, and the discipline to insist on complete answers.

Question one: where does our data live, and who else benefits from it?

The most important question, and the fastest filter. A supplier whose product learns across customers is redistributing what makes you distinct, however carefully the terms are drafted. Insist on the specific words: is anything we give you pooled with other customers, used to train shared models, or visible to anyone outside our engagement? The answer must be no, no and no, in the contract rather than in the meeting. Watch for the deflection to compliance certificates; certificates describe security, not whose interests the data serves.

Question two: can every automated step be seen, approved and reversed by a person?

In a regulated firm the question is never whether the system is usually right. It is whether you can show, afterwards, what happened and why, and stop it beforehand where it matters. So: is there a log of every action with its reasoning attached? Can we put a person in approval wherever we choose? Can any action be undone? A supplier who treats the log as an enterprise add-on has told you what their product was built for, and it was not your profession.

Question three: does it work from our way of working, or from an average?

Ask to be shown, concretely, what of you the system contains: your documents, your conventions, your rules, your voice. Products built on an industry average demonstrate beautifully, because the demonstration is the average. The gap appears in week three, when the drafts sound like nobody at your firm and the exceptions that make up half your work are all unhandled. The honest suppliers will tell you what shaping to your firm costs and how long it takes. The theatre will tell you it works out of the box.

Question four: what does leaving look like?

One day you will want to leave: the supplier disappoints, or is acquired, or the market moves. Ask now: do we get everything back, in a form we can read without you in the room? What is deleted at your end, and how is that shown? A supplier with a clean answer has thought about your interests past the invoice. A supplier without one is quoting you the price of entry while hiding the price of exit, and the second number is always larger.

The afternoon test

Put all four to any supplier, including us, and insist the answers arrive in writing. The market sorts itself in an afternoon: most decks fail on question one alone. Whoever survives all four has earned the second meeting, and the proving period that should follow it, in shadow, against your real work, before anything touches a client. What that proving period looks like is on the implementation page; what we commit to on all four questions, in writing, is on Trust and data.