Buying AI: Vendor and Procurement Due Diligence

An AI purchase differs from ordinary software in four ways a demo will not show you: the behaviour is statistical, the performance is conditional on data you have not seen, the purchase changes your regulatory position, and the product does not stay the same. This cursus covers the whole buy: scoping the decision rather than the tool, and settling whether you remain a deployer or become the provider; the diligence pack, why instructions for use are the key document, and designing a pilot that can actually fail; then the contract terms, drift monitoring, incident cooperation and exit.