The AI Buyer's Guide

The first decision is the framing. Build your own AI capability, buy a product, or find a middle path. The answer depends on how specific your use case is, how much you need to own, and whether your competitive advantage lives in the AI itself or in what the AI enables. Most organisations get this wrong by defaulting to buy when they should build, or build when they should buy.

Traditional consulting sells time and advice. AI delivery needs something different. It needs partners who build, ship, and transfer capability. The consulting model breaks because consultants are incentivised to extend engagements, not to build things that work without them. Knowing when you need a consultant and when you need a builder matters.

A practical 30-point checklist built from real enterprise procurement processes. Technical capability, delivery track record, IP ownership, support model, and the questions most evaluation frameworks miss. Designed for procurement teams who need to compare AI vendors on criteria that actually predict success.

Most enterprise AI RFPs are written using traditional software procurement templates with "AI" bolted on. They ask for fixed pricing on uncertain scope, require specific model names that'll be outdated by contract signing, and evaluate vendors on feature lists rather than delivery capability. The RFP format actively selects for the wrong AI partner.

"Production in 4 weeks" usually means a demo in 4 weeks. Vendor timelines are marketing tools, not delivery commitments. How to decode what vendors actually mean, set realistic expectations, and build contracts that hold vendors to outcomes rather than timelines.

Most "AI companies" are thin layers over someone else's model. Nothing wrong with that if you know what you're buying. Everything wrong with it if you're paying for proprietary capability and getting an API wrapper with a logo on it. Five specific red flags that reveal whether your vendor builds AI or just resells it.

The final distinction. Vendors sell products. Partners build capability. For standard use cases with well-defined scope, a vendor is fine. For domain-specific AI that needs ongoing development, IP ownership, and internal capability transfer, you need a partner. How to tell which one you need and how to evaluate accordingly.

We wrote this series because we keep seeing the same procurement mistakes. Organisations that spend months on vendor evaluation and then pick the wrong partner because the evaluation criteria were wrong. The budget is real. The risk is real. And the difference between a good AI investment and a bad one is usually visible in the procurement process if you know what to look for.