As a non-technical business owner, I am sitting through vendor demos for AI-powered operations platforms and do not know what questions to ask. How do I evaluate whether their tool will actually work in my business or if it is just a slick wrapper around a basic language model?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Ignore the presentation slides and scripted interface tours. Most vendors present pre-recorded demos using perfect synthetic data that masks how fragile their software actually is.

Take control of the conversation by forcing the vendor to operate inside your business realities. Ask these specific questions:

- Show me the exact workflow when the system encounters messy data, missing fields, or conflicting instructions. Who gets alerted, and how does a human intervene?
- Where does our company data travel, where is it stored, and do your model providers use our proprietary operational data for training?
- What is the ongoing maintenance commitment? Who updates the system when our internal processes change, and does that require your professional services billable hours?
- If we cancel our subscription next year, how do we extract our historical data and the institutional logic your tool built?

Require the vendor to run an unscripted test using three of your real, imperfect operational documents or raw customer service records. If they refuse or claim it requires a paid proof of concept, you are looking at technical theater.

Look for tools that integrate directly into your core business applications via standard APIs. An operational tool must reduce friction for the seats on your Accountability Chart, not introduce another isolated dashboard your team has to log into and babysit every morning.