A structured discipline for assessing third-party LLM APIs, vector stores, and agentic platforms across security posture, data residency, eval performance, tota
AI vendor evaluation is procurement craft for a hype-dense market: testing claims with your own data, interrogating evals and security posture, modeling true costs (tokens, integration, lock-in), and writing contracts that survive model deprecations and pricing shifts.
Growing with the market's noise: enterprises burned by 2023–25 procurement now staff for disciplined evaluation, and practitioners who cut through demos with evidence save organizations multiples of their cost.
Buying the demo: vendor-curated scenarios on vendor-chosen data. The antidote is a structured pilot on your data with pre-agreed success criteria: before commercial negotiation locks momentum.
Data usage (training rights), model-change notice and rollback, pricing protections, exportability, and exit assistance. AI products mutate quarterly; contracts must assume it.