Five Questions to Ask Before You Buy Any AI Tool

Before you buy any AI tool, ask these five questions. The answers tell you more than the demo ever will.

One: What data does it touch? If the tool sees customer names, financials, or anything sensitive, your diligence bar goes up accordingly.

Two: Where does our data go? Your data might travel to the vendor's servers, to a cloud provider, or to third parties you have never heard of. Get the full path in writing.

Three: What was it trained on, and what are its limits? You don't need the technical recipe. You need to know what it's bad at, so you don't deploy it where it will fail.

Four: What happens when it's wrong? Every AI tool is wrong sometimes. Ask how errors surface, who catches them, and what the vendor does about them.

Five: How do we leave? Ask about data export, deletion, and contract exit terms before you sign. The best time to negotiate your exit is when everyone still likes each other.

You don't need to be technical to ask these. You need to be the person in the room who asks what happens when things go sideways. That's the whole job.

I explain frameworks; I don't give legal counsel.