Choosing an AI Development Partner After Two Failed Pilots

Company profile: Mid-market logistics company, ~200 employees, evaluating AI vendors for a customer-service automation project.

"We'd already been through two AI pilots that never made it to production. Both vendors were confident, both demos looked great, and both times we hit the same wall around month five — the model worked fine in testing, but nobody had actually planned for what happens when it's wrong in front of a real customer.

By the third search, I stopped trusting pitch decks entirely. I wanted to talk to people who'd actually used a vendor, not references the vendor had hand-picked for us. That's when a colleague pointed me toward C2Creview's software development category. What stood out wasn't that the reviews were glowing — some weren't — it was that they were specific. One review mentioned exactly how a vendor handled a scope change mid-project. Another mentioned response times during an incident. That's the kind of detail you don't get from a sales call.

We shortlisted three agencies off the software development leaders page and asked every one of them the same question our first two vendors had dodged: 'Walk me through what happened the last time a deployment didn't go as planned.' Two of the three gave us real, specific answers. That's who we hired.

Eight months in, the project's live in production — not a pilot, not a proof of concept. It's not because this vendor had better technology than the first two. It's because they'd actually thought through the parts nobody puts in a demo."