Age of Invisible Machines

CHAPTER 12Vetting Your Vendors

When approaching any vendor in this space, you should be armed with a litany of items to crosscheck: voice and NLU capabilities, channel flexibility, compatibility issues, development cycles—the list spirals on.

Despite the complexity, there's one thing you should find out before asking anything else:

How much of a vendor's own business is run by the same kinds of machines they are selling you? Whether they're a platform vendor or a services vendor, it should be easy for them to show you how they've put their solution to use for themselves.

If they've truly found a way to make hyperautomation sing, people across their entire organization will be creating, using, and iterating on the technology regularly.

The Cobbler's Children Have New Shoes: The Feasibility Vendor Litmus Test

A successful ecosystem of IDWs is such a game changer in terms of efficiency and productivity that if a vendor has figured out how to make complexity feasible in conversational AI, they will definitely be using their own products internally (or if they're a services vendor, they will have a rapidly growing number of valuable examples that everyone internally knows and that they're regularly improving upon). Initiate your assessment by asking vendors these kinds of questions:

• Have you successfully automated internal processes?
• Are your internal machines integral to your own operations? (Or are they just window dressing?)
• Are employees within your organization clamoring ...