Daily Archives: January 24, 2025

Need a Good Solution? Make sure you ask the right questions off the bat … not just the hard ones!

It’s only been a few months since our last post on the topic of vendor selection where we flat out said that if you want a good solution from a good vendor, you need to start off by asking the hard questions off the bat , and gave you the 1-2-3 punch you should start with, but it seems that some vendors have come up with new tricks and you now need a 1-2 pre-qualification phase before the 1-2-3 knockout combo before you can decide if a vendor’s solution is worthy of your consideration.

Now that we have the richer enterprise vendors deploying fully AI-agents to make their standard pitches, create their demos, and, in some cases, even handle their fund-raising and sales cycles, you don’t know if you’re even talking to a human! And you need to talk to a human. An “AI” will only tell you what it is programmed to say and only feed you what it thinks you want to hear, and we all know how that is a recipe for disaster.

Thus, the first question you need to ask in the pre-qualification one-two punch is:

1. “Please tell me whether or not you are an AI construct, knowing that this conversation may be recorded and that if a falsehood is spoken, it may be used against your employer in a court of law, especially if the intent of such falsehood was to deceive us. Also, we retain the right to ask you to prove your response at any time.”

If you get a “yes” response, you must immediately disconnect and eliminate the vendor from your consideration. If they won’t even let you talk to a lowly pre-sales person in a third world country, what chance will you ever have of speaking to a real support person if something goes wrong?

If you get past this question, then the next question is:

2. “Is your offering built around, or just, someone else’s LLM/Gen-AI/AGI (including, but NOT limited to, ChatGPT, Claude, Azure, etc.) offering in a new wrapper? Again, this conversation may be recorded and we retain the right to use everything you say against your employer in a court of law, especially if the intent of the falsehood was to deceive us. Also, we reserve the right to an independent audit of your solution at any time upon purchase thereof.”

If you get a “yes” response, you again must immediately disconnect and eliminate the vendor from your consideration.

i. As SI has repeatedly informed, you there are only a few valid uses for Gen-AI on its own, and even fewer valid uses for Gen-AI in Procurement.

ii. Why should you pay a steep markup to a third party for a shiny wrapper when you can just license the source at a fraction of the cost?

Now, if you have confirmed you are talking to a real vendor rep offering you a real solution built by the vendor PRIMARILY on their own stack (and not just a third party’s in a shiny wrapper) that does something useful for at least some Procurement departments, then you hit-them with the one-two-three punch we gave you last fall:

3. Can, and will, you show me (not tell me) live … preferably on use cases or data I give you on the spot?

Again, the most critical point is you don’t want a canned demo, you want a live display showing you that their solution will do what you need it to do. (Not necessarily the way you envisioned, your process might not be the best or the most technologically friendly, but in a way that will solve your problem.)

4. Once you show me the core use cases, can, and will, you explain the breadth of use cases you developed your solution for and how they are specific to my business?

You want a vendor who can do more than answer a specific question when asked, and tell you the standard script on what their product does. You want a vendor that knows the real world problems that businesses have and who tirelessly works to build a solution to solve those real-world problems.

5. Once we tell you the extent of your solution we feel is appropriate, can you talk us through what the implementation and integration to our environment would require without bringing in a paid third party “expert” consultant? And how long will that take?

It may be a great solution during the demo, but the reality is that it is only a great solution for you if your team adopts it, which will only happen if it works on the technology platform and in the technology ecosystem they are forced to work in. It needs to seamlessly get the required data in from other applications, make it easy for the users to do their tasks, and then push out the needed alterations and decisions to other systems in the ecosystem. An app that stands alone will never get used and will fail even before the implementation starts.

If you get through these 5 questions, you have a real vendor with a real solution which will solve your problems to some degree, and one who should definitely be on the RFP shortlist, if not fast-tracked to negotiation if they solve a critical problem in a way that just works for you.