Four AI suppliers, no way to tell which is real
We are paying four suppliers for AI and I cannot tell the board which of them is working.
// The diagnosis
Everything in this market is now sold as an agent, and Gartner puts the number of vendors with genuine agentic capability at roughly 130 out of thousands making the claim. Same research: more than 40% of agentic projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027, on cost, unclear value and weak controls. You are not being asked to judge technology. You are being asked to defend four invoices, and nobody has given you the test that separates them.
// ADVISE
Each supplier gets traced to a number your business already reports. The ones that cannot be traced get named. You end with a position on keep, consolidate and cancel, with the evidence next to each, written so it survives the meeting you will not be in.
// The outcome
A defensible answer for the board, and usually a budget back that was funding something nobody could describe.
// Before you call
Ask each supplier one question: how would we know, from our own numbers, if we switched you off. Keep the answers. That exercise alone is worth doing whether or not you call me.
Not this if the decision is already made politically and you want cover for it.
// The service that answers it
Where to aimAI consulting that ends in decisions, not decks. Start here if you do not yet know which of the other two you need. Every recommendation comes from someone who would have to build it, which tends to shorten the list.Two to three weeks// The other calls I get
- 01Everyone agrees we should be doing this. Nobody has an afternoon to spare.
- 02Every time we want to build something, we have to go outside for it.
- 03Legal will not approve it, so officially nobody here uses AI.
- 04We cannot take on more work without hiring more of the person we cannot find.
- 05Most of what we earn arrives through a platform we do not control and cannot integrate with.
- 07We have been at this a year and I still cannot put a number next to any of it.
// If this one is yours
It goes straight to my inbox. No sequence, no sales team.