Stop Evaluating AI Vendors on Their Demos

Every AI vendor gives a great demo. That’s their job. The demo environment is controlled, the data is clean, the use case is cherry-picked, and the person driving it has done it 500 times.

Your environment has none of those properties.

What to Evaluate Instead

Ask to run the tool on your actual data. Not a sample they prepared. Your messy, inconsistent, real-world data. Watch what happens.

Ask about failure modes. What happens when the model is wrong? How do users know? What’s the correction workflow? A vendor who can’t answer these questions clearly hasn’t thought hard enough about production use.

Ask about the last three customers who churned. Why did they leave? What went wrong? This tells you more than any case study ever will.

The Integration Question

The flashiest AI in the world is useless if it can’t plug into your existing workflow. Where does the data come from? Where do results go? Who monitors quality? These are the questions that determine whether something moves from “cool demo” to “actually valuable.”