Your Vendor's AI Was Trained on Something. Ask What.

You wouldn't buy food without reading the label. Don't buy AI without asking what it trained on.

Every AI product was trained on something: customer conversations, public web pages, licensed datasets, synthetic data, some mix of all four. That training data shapes what the system knows, what it assumes, and whose information might be echoing in its answers.

So ask. What data trained this model? How was it sourced? Did it include personal data, and if so, with whose permission? How do you keep our data separate from training?

A good vendor answers clearly and in writing. A vendor who waves it away with "proprietary" is telling you something too. Listen to that.

You are not being difficult. You are reading the label.

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