Our software vendors keep pushing expensive upgrades featuring new AI features, claiming massive productivity increases. How should an owner evaluate these vendor pitches to avoid buying useless technology theater?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Most legacy software vendors are desperately attempting to protect their valuations by slapping shallow language model wrappers onto existing databases and demanding a twenty to forty percent price increase. If you buy these upgrades based on vendor marketing, you will pay premium subscriptions for tools your team neither needs nor uses.

Evaluate every software vendor AI pitch through an unvarnished operational lens. Ask three direct questions:

- Does this tool eliminate a verified bottleneck already identified on our V/TO, or is it solving a problem we do not have? If the feature does not directly address a measurable friction point on your Scorecard or Core Processes, decline the upgrade immediately.

- Can our internal team build this workflow using our existing central tools and simple API connectors? Most vendor features amount to basic text summarization or notification triggers that can be built internally in an afternoon using standard automation software for a fraction of the cost.

- What happens to our corporate data when this tool processes it? Ensure the vendor contract explicitly prohibits using your operational data to train their commercial models.

Refuse to pay software markups for generic artificial intelligence. Focus exclusively on whether the technology produces a measurable reduction in operational cycle time, lowers labor costs per transaction, or increases delivery capacity. Frame every tech decision as an operations improvement project, mentioning the underlying technology only as an operational footnote.