Before you hire an AI vendor, make them answer these questions

Ask who owns the data model, how prompts and retrieval are versioned, what happens when the model changes behavior, how quality is measured, where sensitive data goes, and how the system fails safely. If the answers are hand-wavy, keep your wallet closed.

Also ask what they refuse to do. Good vendors have boundaries. Bad vendors say yes to everything, then discover production constraints with your budget. That is not innovation. That is tuition.

Ask whether they will work on your corpus in five days, in the environment you name, and leave you with a working path instead of a slide. That question sorts the room.