How to vet an AI vendor for your trades business: a P.E.'s checklist

The AI sales calls have found the trades. Supply yards, excavators, paving crews, septic outfits: if you answer your own phone, somebody has pitched you an "AI receptionist" or an "automation platform" in the last ninety days. Some of those products are good. Most of the pitches are identical, and the demo tells you almost nothing.

Before I started Rylo AI Systems, I spent 15 years as a mining engineer, a lot of it qualifying drilling and blasting contractors and equipment suppliers. A sub's brochure never blew rock for me. Their references did. Their maintenance records did. Their safety file did. The brochure and the demo are the same document: the version of the company they want you to see.

So I vet AI vendors the way I vetted subs. Seven questions, asked out loud, on the sales call. Good vendors answer all seven without flinching. Weak ones start improvising around question three.

1. "Walk me through a call your AI fails."

Every demo is a highlight reel. The rehearsed caller orders two yards of mulch, the bot nails it, everyone smiles. Ignore it. Ask instead about the caller with a leaking hydraulic line, the angry one, the one asking for a product you don't carry.

A good answer sounds like engineering: "It detects that it's off script, hands the caller to a human or voicemail, and logs why." A bad answer sounds like marketing: "Our AI handles virtually anything." Nothing handles everything. Vendors worth hiring design for their own failures. The rest hope you won't ask.

2. "Does it know my catalog, or 'every small business'?"

Run the #57 test. Call the demo and ask for "three tons of 57s, delivered." A generic receptionist product built for dentists and salons has no idea that means #57 limestone. A system configured for your trade quotes it by the ton with your delivery zone math.

The question behind the question: who does the configuration, and against what? If the vendor's answer is "you fill out our online form," you're doing the install yourself. If the answer involves an actual person learning your price sheet, your zones, and your seasonal patterns, that's a different class of product.

3. "Who owns the phone number and the data if we part ways?"

This one ends more meetings than any other. If the vendor provisions the phone number, find out in writing whether you can port it out. If your call recordings, transcripts, and customer records live in their system, find out what an export looks like and what it costs.

A vendor confident in the product makes leaving easy, because they don't expect you to. A vendor who makes leaving painful by design is telling you how the relationship goes once the invoice is the only thing connecting you.

4. "Will my texts actually deliver?"

US carriers filter business text messaging that isn't registered under a framework called A2P 10DLC. Unregistered messages get dropped quietly: no bounce, no error, just silence on the customer's end. It hits delivery confirmations, review requests, appointment reminders, everything.

Registration takes real paperwork and real lead time. Ask any vendor whose product sends texts to show you their registration process and where your business sits in it. A vendor who shrugs at this question is shipping you a feature that partially works.

5. "Which job is this replacing: the volume or the judgment?"

Your counter person does two different jobs. One is volume: the same twelve questions, order details, hours, delivery zones, repeated forty times a day. The other is judgment: reading the contractor who's about to walk, smelling a credit risk, calming down the customer whose load showed up late.

Software absorbs the volume. It has no business touching the judgment. A vendor who claims their product replaces your counter person outright either doesn't understand the counter or is hoping you don't. The right pitch gives your person their hours back for the work that needs a human.

6. "What does month two look like?"

Month one is the honeymoon: fresh install, everyone paying attention. Month two is when your prices change, a product gets discontinued, a new delivery zone opens, and the system either gets updated or starts confidently telling customers things that stopped being true.

Ask who makes those updates, how fast, and what it costs. "You can edit it yourself in the dashboard" is an honest answer if you'll actually do it. Be honest with yourself about whether you will. Systems drift at the speed of the least-maintained config file, and an AI that quotes last season's mulch price is worse than voicemail.

7. "Show me the payback with my numbers, and let me stress-test it live."

Vendor slide decks run payback math on a hypothetical business that misses exactly as many calls as makes the product look great. Make them run it on yours: your call volume, your average ticket, your close rate.

An illustrative version of the math, so you know what to demand. Say a yard misses 10 calls a week, about a third of those callers would have bought, and the average ticket is $450:

• 10 missed calls × 35% would-have-bought = 3.5 lost orders a week
• 3.5 orders × $450 ≈ $1,575 a week, call it $6,800 a month
• Against an $800/month product, that's roughly 8:1 payback. Against $3,000 a month, still better than 2:1.

(Those inputs are illustrative. Your real numbers might be half that or double it, which is the point of asking.) We keep three free calculators for exactly this: missed-call cost, quote margin, and bid cycle time. No email required. Run the vendor's claims through them.

Then stress-test the live product. Any vendor selling voice AI should hand you a phone number and let you try to break it before you sign. Ours is (859) 534-9540. It runs the same stack we sell. Call it, ask it something hard, ask it something off script, and listen to what it does when it doesn't know.

Red flags that end the meeting

• Guaranteed ROI numbers before anyone has asked about your call volume or ticket size.
• Annual contracts on an unproven install. The first 60 days should carry the risk on the vendor's side, not yours.
• No live line to test. If you can only see the product in a screen-share driven by the salesperson, that is the brochure again.
• "It handles everything." See question one.

What we're not claiming

• That every vendor who stumbles on a question is a bad vendor. Young companies have honest gaps. The difference is whether they name the gap or paper over it. Weigh the answer, not just the stumble.
• That Rylo aces all seven on our say-so. Run this checklist on us. Call the demo line and try to break it, ask for the A2P paperwork, ask what leaving looks like. The checklist only works if you apply it to everyone, including the guy who wrote it.
• That AI belongs in every operation. Below a certain call volume, a phone forwarded to your pocket is the right system and costs nothing. Part of vetting a vendor is vetting whether you need one at all.

The actual decision

Print the seven questions. Take them into the next demo. You'll know inside twenty minutes whether you're talking to a builder or a brochure.

Two ways to go further:

1. Stress-test a live system right now: call (859) 534-9540 and ask it the hardest question your customers ask you.
2. Get a real payback number before you take another pitch: the $249 ROI Snapshot is 30 minutes of my time against your actual numbers, a 2-page report, and a straight recommendation, including "you don't need this yet." The fee credits toward anything you do with us later.

Either way, walk into the next sales call the way you'd walk a sub's yard before signing them: eyes open, checklist in hand.

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