Technical Security Assessment: Organizations should evaluate encryption standards (both in-transit and at-rest), authentication mechanisms (including SSO and MFA support), API security practices, and network architecture. Request technical documentation showing how data flows through the system, where it's stored, and what third-party services have access.
Governance and Compliance Framework: Verify the platform's compliance certifications relevant to your industry. Examine data processing agreements, understand data retention policies, and confirm the platform can meet jurisdiction-specific requirements. Ask for evidence of GDPR compliance mechanisms, data portability options, and right-to-deletion capabilities.
Model Safety and Reliability: Evaluate how the platform handles model alignment, what content filtering systems exist, and how harmful outputs are prevented. Request information about model versioning, rollback capabilities, and how the platform manages model updates without disrupting enterprise workflows.
Operational Transparency: Assess the vendor's communication practices around security incidents, update schedules, and service changes. Review SLAs for uptime guarantees, support response times, and escalation procedures. Examine whether the platform provides status pages, incident post-mortems, and proactive security notifications.
Business Continuity Planning: Understand backup procedures, disaster recovery capabilities, and data export options. Evaluate what happens if you need to migrate away from the platform—can you extract your custom AI assistants, knowledge bases, and historical data in usable formats?
Organizations should create a standardized evaluation framework and apply it consistently across all AI platform candidates, including detailed vendor questionnaires that cover these technical, compliance, and operational dimensions.