Vendor RFP Question Bank

27 Questions Your AI Vendor Doesn't Want You to Ask

Grounded in our 5-dimension vendor evaluation framework. Each question includes why it matters, what a red flag answer looks like, and what a good answer sounds like. Copy individual questions or export the complete set for your RFP.

Product Capability & Architecture

Understand what the product actually does vs. what the sales deck claims.

Evaluation weight: Product Capability (25%)

1

“Can you provide a detailed architecture diagram showing how your product integrates with our existing data infrastructure (data warehouse/lake, ERP, CRM)?”

2

“What models power your core functionality? Are they proprietary, fine-tuned open-source, or third-party API calls? What happens if the underlying model provider changes pricing or terms?”

3

“Walk me through a specific production deployment at a company in our industry. What was the timeline from contract to first production inference? What went wrong?”

4

“How does your product handle model updates, retraining, and version management? Can we roll back to a previous model version if a new one underperforms?”

5

“What is the latency of your core inference at our expected volume? Provide p50, p95, and p99 numbers from a production deployment, not benchmarks.”