Hiring a Generative AI Partner in the USA? Start With These Conversations
Almost every software vendor now puts "AI" on its homepage. That makes the feature list nearly useless when you are comparing firms. Over the years I have sat through enough discovery calls to know that the useful questions are different, and they reveal far more than any demo. This article walks through those conversations so you can tell a capable generative AI partner from a convincing presenter. Start With a Problem, Not a Shortlist The best vendor conversations I have seen began with a sentence like this: "Our support team spends about 40% of its time looking up product manuals to answer tickets." Compare that with "we want to use generative AI," which invites a generic pitch. Before you contact anyone, write down the workflow, the people who use it, what it costs you today in time or errors, the data it would need, and how you will know it worked. Vendors who respond to a specific problem with specific questions are usually the ones worth keeping...