Almost every software company now calls itself an AI company. The top AI development companies are the ones that can take an idea past the demo and into a system your team relies on every day: connected to your data, secure, measured and affordable to run. This checklist helps you tell them apart.
1. They start with the business problem, not the model
A strong AI partner asks what decision, task or customer interaction you want to improve, how you measure it today and what a good result is worth. Only then do they choose between a large language model, a classic machine learning model, rules or plain automation. Sometimes the right answer is not AI at all.
2. They are honest about your data
AI quality depends on data quality. Expect questions about where your documents, tickets, CRM records or transactions live, how clean they are and who may see them. Good teams plan data preparation as part of the project rather than discovering it halfway through.
3. They know LLMs, RAG and agents in practice
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) so answers come from your own documents, with sources
- AI agents that take actions in your systems, with limits and human approval where needed
- Model choice across providers, weighing quality, speed, cost and where data is processed
- Evaluation: test sets and metrics that show whether a change made the system better or worse
4. Security and privacy are designed in
Ask how prompts and data are stored, whether your data is used to train third-party models, how access is controlled and how the system handles personal data. In regulated industries such as banking and healthcare, ask for experience with your compliance requirements.
5. They have shipped AI to production
Ask to see a live AI system and what happened after launch: monitoring, user feedback, cost per conversation or per document, and how quality is kept up as data changes. Demos are easy; production is where most AI projects succeed or fail.
6. Pricing you can understand
Expect a phased plan: a short discovery and proof of concept with clear success criteria, then a production build, then running costs (model usage, hosting, support). A partner who cannot estimate running costs has probably not run AI in production.
Quick checklist
- Business case and success metric agreed up front
- Data sources, quality and access reviewed
- RAG, agents and model choice explained in plain language
- Security, privacy and data residency answered in writing
- At least one live AI system you can see
- Evaluation and monitoring plan
- Build cost and monthly running cost estimated
How ACS works on AI projects
ACS is a custom AI development company in India with offices in Houston, London and Dubai. We build generative AI, RAG and AI agent solutions, including our own BotOnWeb AI agents for business, and integrate AI into existing CRM, ERP and support systems. Learn more about our AI development services or start with AI consulting to find the use cases worth building first.