How do you navigate the sea of software available today to find the AI tool that’s right for your enterprise? It requires diligent up-front assessment of both the AI tool and the vendor before making an AI technology purchasing decision.
Cutting through the noise with the right AI technology questions and getting the facts is an important but complicated task. To help you conquer it and find the right AI partner for your business, we drafted 24 questions to ask any AI vendor before purchasing.
Here are the topics to cover and specific questions to ask during your evaluation.
Core Capabilities
First, start with the core capabilities that you are looking to get from your AI vendor. This will help you get a baseline understanding of the tool to see whether it fits your specific team’s or company’s use cases. Here are a few questions to get you started:
1. What specific enterprise use cases does your AI solution address?
2. Can your generative AI models be trained or fine-tuned with our proprietary data so that they can provide contextually aware guidance?
3. How customizable and scalable is your solution to our exact needs?
User Experience
Next, it’s important to understand how user-friendly the technology is. Since AI is still relatively new to the business world, your workforce’s AI literacy may vary. You want to look for an AI partner that is intuitive, easy to use, and works wherever your employees do. Now is also a good time to ask if you can see a product tour, or better yet, if your team can participate in a trial period so you can properly evaluate the technology.
4. How user-friendly is your AI solution for non-technical workers?
5. What is the ramp-up time for our employees to learn to use your solution?
6. Do you provide a demo or trial period for us to evaluate the solution?
Technical Deployment
Now things start to get technical. Implementing new technology across one team or your entire enterprise is a large undertaking. It’s important that your IT team has the information they need to properly resource the project and ensure that it aligns with their approach to safe AI adoption. Here are a few important questions to ask when considering deploying a new AI solution:
7. What are the hardware and software requirements for implementing your solution?
8. How easily can your solution be integrated with our existing tech stack?
9. How long will it take to integrate your AI system or tools into our existing operations?
Data Handling and Security
Security, data privacy, and protection of company intellectual property are top AI concerns for almost two-thirds of knowledge workers and business leaders. You’ll want to choose a secure and reputable AI provider that you can trust with the protection of sensitive company data.
10. What’s your approach to model training, retraining, and maintenance?
11. How do you handle and store data used for training your AI models?
12. What are the data retention policies for data we provide or generate using your AI?
13. What measures do you have in place to ensure data is kept confidential and secure, especially sensitive data?
Responsible AI
In addition to ensuring that your data is handled securely, it’s important to look for AI vendors that are committed to responsible and transparent use. Leveraging technological advances like AI is disruptive in many ways. That’s why it’s important to partner only with companies that are guided by the belief that AI innovations should enhance people’s skills while respecting personal autonomy and compliance regulations.
14. How transparent and explainable are your models?
15. How do you ensure that your AI solution adheres to ethical guidelines and avoids bias or hallucinations?
16. What measures are in place to prevent the generation of harmful or inappropriate content?
17. What legal considerations and compliance standards does your AI solution adhere to (e.g., GDPR, CCPA)?
Customer Support
Strong customer support will ensure a smooth implementation and effective use of your new AI solution. Make sure that you ask your vendor what kind of support experience you can expect during onboarding, implementation, and on an ongoing basis. Additionally, you’ll want a company that has extensive self-guided support so you and your team can quickly find answers on their own.
18. Do you offer ongoing support, training, and access to experts to help us maximize the value of your technology?
19. Do you provide documentation and resources for troubleshooting and best practices?
20. How can we report feedback on issues or suggest improvements?
Costs and ROI
Finally, understanding the pricing model will help you determine whether this vendor fits within your allocated budget. You’ll want to dig into the estimated ROI of the new tool so that you can justify the investment, and get customer testimonials (ideally from customers within your industry or function) to hear positive social proof about their solution.
21. What is the pricing model, and are there any hidden costs?
22. Can you provide a clear ROl estimate for our specific use cases?
23. How can we measure the impact and effectiveness of your solution?
24. Can you provide case studies to back up these ROI claims?
Addressing these key questions can help you make a smart investment and select the best AI solution for your business or team.
Want to learn how Grammarly stacks up? Download this cheat sheet to evaluate Grammarly’s secure AI writing assistance for your organization.
