If you run a company around Dayton or Cincinnati, 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 start with one job?
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 can only sell you the whole thing 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 watching your office gets summarised 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 local still matters here
None of the seven questions are about geography. But the reason we work the way we do — an hour at your office before anything is scoped — is that the answers to “what does a right answer look like” are sitting in your building, not in a requirements document. Being fifteen minutes away in Springboro makes that hour cheap enough to give away.
Ask us the seven questions too. If our answers don't hold up, you've lost a phone call.
Start with one job
A free one-hour walkthrough at your office picks the job. Three days later you see it running on your own files.
Start with a walkthrough →