We get asked to pitch against other firms fairly often. The procurement teams who end up with good outcomes ask a noticeably different set of questions from the ones who do not.
Here is what I would ask if I were buying. Several of these are awkward for us to answer too.
Do you take a cut of what we buy?
If the answer is yes, then the hardware recommendation and the software recommendation are sales, whatever else they also are. That does not make the firm dishonest. It makes that particular advice worth less, and you should price it accordingly.
Who exactly will do the work?
Ask for names, not job titles. Then ask whether those people are in the room because they will deliver or because they present well. In a lot of firms the second team arrives after signature and nobody mentions the swap.
What would make you tell us not to build this?
A supplier who cannot describe a situation in which they would advise against their own service has no limit. You will get a build whether or not one is warranted.
How will we know in six months whether it worked?
The answer should involve a number that exists before the project starts. If it involves user satisfaction, how many people logged in, or a screen full of charts, ask again.
Where will our data sit while you work on it?
Your cloud account or theirs. Your servers or somebody's laptop. Inside the UAE or outside it. These have genuinely different answers, and suppliers are sometimes vague here because the honest answer is a laptop.
What happens when the system stops performing?
These systems get quietly worse over time as the world around them changes. If nobody has offered you automatic checks that the answers are still right, then the plan is that a user will eventually notice, and by that point it will have been wrong for weeks.
Could we remove you?
The real test of a handover is whether you could end the relationship and lose nothing except goodwill. Ask what you receive. The source code, the trained model itself, the set of real examples with known right answers you tested against, written instructions for running it day to day, and documentation aimed at whoever inherits it rather than at the invoice.
What do you not do?
A firm that does everything does nothing in particular. I would rather hear a short and specific list, including the work they send elsewhere.
What went wrong on the last one?
I would weight this most heavily. Every real project has a bad month. A supplier who cannot name theirs has either not delivered much or will not tell you the truth when yours arrives.
You are welcome to put all nine to us. Most of the answers are elsewhere on this site. The one about the bad month is better over a call.
Working through this on a live programme?
A 45-minute call with the engineer who would run the work. We will tell you whether AI is the answer, including when it is not.