# Twenty questions to ask an AI vendor — Radexus

> Including the four that most cannot answer, and what a good answer sounds like.

*Source: https://radexus.com/guides/vendor-questions/*

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# Twenty questions to ask an AI vendor

Including the four that most cannot answer, and what a good answer sounds like.

- Written for: **For everyone**
- Length: **8 pages**
- Reading time: **8 min**

In this guide
- [On the number](#h-0)
- [On what accumulates](#h-1)
- [On the plumbing](#h-2)
- [On governance](#h-3)
- [On the commercials](#h-4)

[Download](https://radexus.com/downloads/radexus-vendor-questions.txt)

Use it on us as well. If we cannot answer one of these to your satisfaction, that is information you should act on.

Grouped by what they test. The starred four are the ones that most reliably separate serious proposals from confident ones.

## On the number

-   Which single number moves, and who in our company owns it?
-   Is it computable from data we already keep?
-   Who reports the result at the end, you or us?
-   What does the contract say if it does not clear?

## On what accumulates

-   In year three, what will we know that we do not know today?
-   Where is that knowledge held, and does it survive the departure of the person who taught it to you?
-   How does knowledge that has become false get retired?
-   Does anything we produce improve a system used by another client?

## On the plumbing

-   How do you handle the same customer existing four times in four systems?
-   Where are the definitions of our metrics stored, and what happens when one changes?
-   Can you trace any number on any screen back to its source system and read time, in under a minute?
-   What happens when a source system changes its schema?

Use these on us as well. If we cannot answer one, that is information you should act on.

## On governance

-   Who approves a write into our ERP, and can your engineers do it?
-   Show me a dry run and a rollback.
-   What are your evaluation gates, who set the thresholds, and has a gate ever blocked one of your releases?
-   Who labels the golden datasets?

## On the commercials

-   If we stop paying, what stops working?
-   Whose cloud does it run in?
-   Who owns the derived data and the labels our team produced?
-   What happens to our contract if you are acquired?

**The four that hurt**Has a gate ever blocked one of your releases? What happens to the running system if we stop paying? Who owns the labels our team produced? In year three, what will we know that we do not know today? A vendor with good answers gives them immediately.

**Take it with you**

Full text, no form, no email capture. Print to PDF or download as plain text.

[Download text](https://radexus.com/downloads/radexus-vendor-questions.txt)Print or save PDF

**Use this on us**

Every question in this guide is one we expect to answer. If we cannot, that is information you should act on.

[Start a discovery](https://radexus.com/start/)

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