If you run a company in the Cincinnati area, your inbox has AI pitches in it. Some are from good firms. Many are from resellers attaching a markup to somebody else's subscription. These seven questions sort them out quickly, and you can ask all of them in a fifteen-minute phone call.
1. Whose cloud account does it run in?
The answer should be yours. If the system lives in the vendor's account, your operating data is sitting inside somebody else's business, and leaving means leaving it behind. Ask them to say the words “your own account” and then ask who holds the credentials.
2. What does it cost when we stop paying you?
With a subscription, the answer is that it stops working. That may be fine for a tool. It is a bad answer for something your office depends on daily. Ask what specifically keeps running if the relationship ends tomorrow.
3. Can we see it working before we commit?
Be suspicious of anything that requires a company-wide rollout, a data strategy or a steering committee before you see anything work. A vendor who won't show you your own system working before you sign is telling you something about how much of it is real.
4. Who actually does the work?
Ask whether the person on the call will be the person building it. In a small engagement, hand-offs are where the context dies — everything they learned about your office gets summarized into a ticket and lost.
5. Where does our data go, exactly?
Not “it's secure” — ask for the path. Which service, in which account, under whose terms, and whether it can be used to train anybody's model. A vendor who cannot answer this in plain sentences hasn't thought about it.
6. What does the AI do when it doesn't know?
This is the question that separates the serious from the rest. In an operations setting, a confident wrong answer is far worse than “I couldn't find that.” Ask to see what happens when the answer isn't in your documents, and ask whether answers come back with the source attached.
7. Who approves before something goes out?
A drafted email is useful. An email your system sent to a customer without anyone reading it is a liability. Ask where the human sign-off sits, and be wary of anyone who treats that as a limitation rather than the design.
Why we work the way we do
None of the seven questions are about geography. But the reason we build a working demo of the job on your own examples before anyone agrees a price is that the answers to “what does a right answer look like” are sitting in your files and in your people's heads, not in a requirements document. A demo is the quickest way to get them out.
Ask us the seven questions too. If our answers don't hold up, you've lost a phone call.