How to Tell a Vendor AI Roadmap From a Vendor AI Story
Five architectural signals that separate a genuine AI capability from a marketing response to market pressure, and what to ask in a demo to tell the two apart.
- 01
Where the model actually runs
A real AI capability has a clear answer on hosting, data residency and inference cost. A story has a logo slide and a partnership announcement.
- 02
What the data contract looks like
Genuine roadmaps describe how customer data is used, retained and isolated for training and inference. Stories leave this to the security questionnaire and hope no one asks twice.
- 03
How features degrade when the model is wrong
Mature AI products show their work, surface confidence and have a graceful fallback. Demo-grade features assume the model is always right and break loudly when it is not.
- 04
Who owns evaluation
A credible roadmap names the metrics, the test sets and the team responsible for regression. A story shows a single impressive prompt and changes the subject.
- 05
What ships in the next two releases
Roadmaps have dated, scoped, sequenced increments. Stories have a vision deck and a research preview that has been six months away for eighteen months.
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