What to Check Before Hiring an AI Implementation Partner

Most AI implementation partners look similar on a website. The differences show up under specific questions. Use this list in first conversations and in a written RFP.

Technical capability

• Which parts of the stack do they build themselves and which do they outsource?
• Can they show a working system they built, not a slide?
• Which model providers and clouds have they deployed on in production?

Production experience

• How many systems have they taken from pilot to production in the last 12 months?
• What broke in production and what did they change?
• Ask for a case study with the client's problem, the integration list and the outcome, ideally with a public source.

Evaluation and quality

• How do they build evaluation datasets and who labels them?
• What do they measure before and after launch?
• What tracing and monitoring do they leave behind?

Security and data handling

• Where does data go, which subprocessors see it, and for how long?
• Can they deploy inside your VPC or on-prem if needed?
• Which compliance evidence can they share (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR)?

Architecture and integration

• Ask them to sketch the architecture for your workflow in the call.
• How do they handle failures in integrations: retries, dead letters, human fallback?

Team composition

• Who exactly will work on your project and for what share of their time?
• Have those people shipped a similar deployment before?
• What happens if a key engineer leaves?

Delivery and communication

• What does week one look like?
• How often do you see working software?
• Which tools will they work in: yours or theirs?

Support and handover

• What is included after launch and for how long?
• What does handover contain: code, runbooks, evaluation sets, dashboards?

Pricing and contract

• What is the minimum engagement and what triggers change requests?
• Who owns the IP, including prompts, evaluation data and fine-tuned weights?
• Can you speak to two reference customers?

The downloadable vendor evaluation checklist on this platform turns this into a scoring sheet you can use across providers.