Every seller should read the buyer's playbook, and this is a clean one. The uncomfortable takeaway, the tools getting cancelled first are the ones that were always a "nice to have" and knew it. You don't out-discount this pressure, you avoid it by being the thing whose removal someone would actually feel.
The information asymmetry you describe is the core problem in AI procurement specifically. Vendors build their pitch around best-case deployment scenarios and benchmark performance; buyers don't have access to real production data across comparable companies. That's the gap that makes mid-market buyers especially vulnerable — they don't have the procurement infrastructure that enterprise teams use to normalize vendor claims, but they're being sold enterprise-grade AI at enterprise complexity.
If you have a unique, or AI/ML specific use case I would oblige the POC request. But if you’re asking for proof of basic features like ingesting data, spinning up compute, etc then it’s going to be a hard no from me dawg.
Every seller should read the buyer's playbook, and this is a clean one. The uncomfortable takeaway, the tools getting cancelled first are the ones that were always a "nice to have" and knew it. You don't out-discount this pressure, you avoid it by being the thing whose removal someone would actually feel.
The information asymmetry you describe is the core problem in AI procurement specifically. Vendors build their pitch around best-case deployment scenarios and benchmark performance; buyers don't have access to real production data across comparable companies. That's the gap that makes mid-market buyers especially vulnerable — they don't have the procurement infrastructure that enterprise teams use to normalize vendor claims, but they're being sold enterprise-grade AI at enterprise complexity.
If you have a unique, or AI/ML specific use case I would oblige the POC request. But if you’re asking for proof of basic features like ingesting data, spinning up compute, etc then it’s going to be a hard no from me dawg.
Of course. I was mostly referencing AI stuff with that. Although I am sure folks can push for more basic POCs as well in today’s market