Assessing Vendor Capability

Vendors who sell forward deployed AI work often arrive with polished material: a deck that explains their approach, a handful of case studies with headline outcomes, and a confident account of what their team can do. When you are deciding whether a vendor can actually deliver, it is tempting to treat that material as proof. This article examines that common belief and replaces it with a more reliable test.

The reason a deck cannot settle the question comes down to what each artifact lets you verify. A slide deck is written by the vendor to describe its work. A case study is a narrative about past results. Both are produced to present the vendor well, and neither lets you check the work yourself.

The gap between a description and a working system is exactly the gap this review is designed to expose. Describing a system and operating one are different claims. A description can be accurate, but it cannot show you how the system behaves when real inputs arrive, or whether anyone watches it after it goes live.

The review begins with a direct request. The source gives the wording to use: ask the vendor to show the production code it has shipped for a previous customer. The request is specific on purpose, and each part of it does work.

The source is direct about timing: do not sign the contract until you have seen the running code. The key evidence is a system currently running in another customer's environment, and the vendor should be able to walk you through it.

The difference between an FDE motion and a consulting motion shows up in what the vendor can put in front of you. The comparison below summarizes the contrast the source draws. It is about the evidence a vendor is able to show, which is what makes it useful during a review.

On the FDE side, the strongest evidence is the running system itself. A thorough walkthrough covers eval evidence, the dashboard, and operational instrumentation. Together these show that the system is measured and monitored in operation, not merely built. On the consulting side sit the materials the vendor writes to describe its work: the deck and the case studies. The source treats these as signs of a consulting motion rather than an FDE motion.

The review proceeds in a fixed order, and the first question decides which path you follow. The flow below shows the sequence from the vendor's claim to the decision about signing.

The first branch is the most important. A yes moves the review toward examining the evidence inside that system. A no places the vendor in the category the source associates with a consulting motion, and the contract should not be signed on the strength of the presentation alone.