BAA, data residency, eval transparency, model versioning. The 12 due-diligence questions that surface a bad vendor in under an hour.
Most AI vendor RFPs are 60 questions long and miss the 12 that matter. Below are the 12 questions that surface a bad vendor in under an hour. We run this list on every platform before we recommend it to a client. What to measure in the first 30 days Most teams measure too many things and then measure nothing. The 30-day measurement plan is short: Handle rate.
Of inbound contacts in the channel where AI is now answering, what percent did AI successfully complete versus escalate or drop. This is the deflection metric in chat language. Median minutes from first contact to whatever the business cares about: booked, ordered, refunded, qualified. Cost per completed interaction. All-in, including telephony, STT, TTS, LLM, observability, and your eval and ops time amortized.
BAA, data residency, eval transparency, model versioning. The 12 due-diligence questions that surface a bad vendor in under an hour. It is filed under AI Strategy because that is where operators looking for this problem actually start, and it is written from production work rather than from a content calendar.