The AI Demo Your Vendor Hopes You Never Request
Ask your AI vendor for one simple demo: Show me a conversation where your AI completely pukes.
Ask your AI vendor for one simple demo: Show me a conversation where your AI completely pukes.
Watch them scramble.
"Well, we focus on successful interactions..." "Our latest model has improved..." "Let me show you this perfect example instead..."
Here's Why They Panic: Every AI fails the same way. Confident hallucination followed by agent cleanup. But vendors only screenshot the wins.
The Demo That Matters:
Customer asks about policy exception
AI confidently invents new policy
Customer believes AI
Agent spends 20 minutes undoing damage
QA dings agent for long handle time
Your vendor has 1,000 of these. They're hoping you never ask.
The Agent Assist Version:
Complex billing question surfaces
AI suggests outdated procedure from 2022
Agent knows it's wrong, follows it anyway (CYA)
Customer gets incorrect resolution
Callback next week doubles handle time
Same movie. Different theater.
The Vendor Blame Game: When I posted yesterday about AI failures, almost every vendor spit-up some version of “Your AI failure is most likely a data issue. Not an AI issue.”
Beautiful. They sold you a solution knowing your data was "a mess" but forgot to mention their AI can't handle reality.
Put this in your AI RFP:
“What's your confidence scoring on wrong answers?"
“How do agents report AI errors?"
“If our data is messy, why did you promise results?"
“Where's your kill switch?"
The Real Tell: If they claim their AI doesn't hallucinate, they're either lying or delusional. GPT-4 hallucinates. Claude hallucinates. Your $3M vendor definitely hallucinates.
The honest vendors say: "AI fails predictably. Here's how we handle it." The cowboys show more demos of perfect conversations.
What Actually Works:
AI that knows when it doesn't know.
Clear escalation paths.
Agent override authority.
Real-time accuracy monitoring.
Measurement of actual help, not just usage.
But that doesn't demo well. So they show you store hours lookups while your reality involves Medicare Part D exceptions and promotional pricing conflicts.
Your Move: Ask for the disaster reel. Ask which calls it can't handle. Ask what agents do when it's wrong.
If they can't show you where AI fails, they can't show you where it works.
Better yet, ask your agents. They've named your AI "Shroomy" in group chat.
Maybe they should run your next vendor demo.