Every Vendor Says AI Now. Ask These Five Questions.
Every software vendor added “AI” at about the same time. What’s underneath varies a lot. These five questions will show you the differences.
1. What data does it act on?
Don’t take the vendor’s word for it. Change one lot’s count mid-demo and ask the same availability question again. The new answer should come back fast and accurate.
2. Can it do real work?
A good conversation isn’t the test. The point to establish is whether it’s a chatbot or whether it can do real, complex work. Hand it a customer’s order list as a spreadsheet or a CSV and check whether the orders exist in the system afterward. Ask it to build a report you’d actually use. Ask it to find an order and everything connected to it: the customer, the items, the ship date.
3. Where are the human gates?
Not every AI action should wait for a person. Over time you’ll want AI doing more and more on its own. The questions to ask: Which actions can it take on its own, and which ones wait for a person to confirm? Two things should hold no matter what: it’s always clear when a change was made by AI, and AI can never do anything destructive.
4. Can you audit what it did?
Any AI taking action in your operation should have logging and traceability. Ask to see the log for a change the assistant made: what it read, what it changed, who made or approved it, and when. The person demoing may not be able to pull it up on the spot; sometimes audit logs live in a separate admin tool. Just make sure they can show you where it lives. You’ll want that trail the first time a count looks wrong and someone asks what happened.
5. How fast does the vendor ship?
If it’s real, you’ll see it in the vendor’s own product: a team that builds with AI releases changes faster. When customers ask for a change, how long does it take to get released, and who pays for it? Ask any vendor what changed in the last ninety days and how customers heard about it.
If a demo can’t show live data, real completed work, deliberate human gates, a log you can audit, and a record of what the vendor shipped, it’s likely a chatbot demo. These five questions apply to us too. Ask us to change a lot count mid-demo.
The full comparison and the questions can be found at How to Choose Grower ERP Software. Bring an AI demo you’re not sure about to a Grower Thursday and book a 30- or 60-minute slot.
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