Your first conversation with a vendor

A demonstration is built to be watched, and a watched demonstration goes well. That is the difficulty with a first vendor meeting: everything you saw was true, and almost none of it tells you what happens on a Tuesday when nobody is presenting. The pages here are chosen so that every question you take into the room has a different answer at different vendors, which is what makes a question worth asking at all.

The first three are to read before the meeting rather than in it. One is an account of the evening itself, written as a chief executive going through exactly this, and it settles what a demonstration can and cannot show you. The second is the vocabulary. A vendor will use the words loop, tool, memory and guard in the first ten minutes, and if those words are still soft when they land you will spend the meeting decoding rather than probing. The third is the comparison against a chatbot, and it is here rather than later because the question you will most want answered is whether what you are being shown is anything more than one, and the six rows in that page are the shape the answer has to take.

Then come the eight questions, in conversation order rather than importance order. A meeting has a shape: the vendor explains how the thing thinks, then what it is allowed to do, then who it does it to, then how you would ever know. The reading follows that shape. You ask about the loop and its limit while the vendor is still describing the machine. You ask which safeguards are code and which are wording once the word safe has been used, and that question changes the temperature of the room more than the other six together. Authority comes next because it has a one-word answer per department, so evasion is visible. Sending and recipients belong together, and belong after authority, since both are only interesting once you know the thing may act at all. The record comes near the end for the reason it comes near the end of a real meeting: a vendor answers it well only if the previous four were answered honestly.

The last two change register. One asks which model handles which kind of question, which sounds technical and is really the tell for whether anybody has costed the system. The other asks how the thing was examined before it met your company, and what the pass mark was. Both are questions a vendor either has a document for or does not, and there is very little middle ground.

The card at the end is the page to print. It reduces the questions to one side of paper with the answer you want and the weaker answer you will more often hear, and it is last because a card is useless until you know why each line is on it.

If the meeting is tomorrow and the evening is gone, read the journey, then the safeguards question, then the authority question, then the card. That is about twenty-five minutes and it leaves you able to ask what is enforced rather than requested, what the thing may do without you in each part of your business, and whether either answer is written down anywhere.

There are thirty-five questions for the vendor and twenty-four are not on this path. Most were left out because they only become answerable later: what breaks when you change provider, what two copies of the agent do to each other, what the bill looks like at your volumes. Those are second-meeting and contract questions. Leaving them out costs you the ones you would want if the first meeting goes well, so read the cluster whole before a proposal arrives rather than after it.