Insights · Trust
Who do you trust to actually do the work?
If you run a company right now, you are being sold AI from every direction. Your inbox is full of it. Your board is asking about it. Someone on your leadership team has a deck about it. And almost none of it comes with a name attached, someone who will still be in the building when the thing breaks at 2am.
That is the actual problem. Not the technology. The technology works. The problem is that you cannot tell, from the outside, who is capable of making it work inside your company, on your data, next to your people, under your constraints.
The confusion is not your fault
The market is designed to confuse you. Strategy firms sell certainty by the slide. Dev shops sell hours. Software vendors sell seats. Each one is incentivized to make the decision sound like their product. None of them is incentivized to say the honest thing: most of the value sits in the boring, specific work of wiring AI into how your company already operates, and that work cannot be done from a conference room.
So CEOs do the rational thing. They wait. They run a small pilot. The pilot demos well and dies in a folder. A year passes. The board asks again.
How to tell an operator from a deck-maker
You do not need to become technical to make this call. You need to change what you ask for. Four tests:
- Ask them to go first. Anyone worth trusting can show you something real about your business before you hand over a single login. If they need a discovery phase to say anything specific, they are selling process, not capability.
- Ask what they shipped to production, and who carries the pager. Not what they recommended. What runs today, and who gets the call when it fails.
- Ask where they sit. If the answer is not "in your standup," they are advising, not operating. Advice is fine. It is also not the bottleneck.
- Ask what happens when they leave. The right answer names your people. If the capability walks out with the vendor, you rented a demo.
Trust is earned in the work, not the pitch
The firms that matter in this cycle carry risk up front. They read your business from public data and show their thinking before the contract. They put engineers inside your walls. They are measured on what runs in production, not what lands in a slide.
That is the bar. Hold everyone to it, including us.