The questions to ask before you buy an AI system

This article is about the contract you sign, not the demo you watch. The demo is where the vendor is at its best. The contract is where it is honest. We read one voice vendor's public pages so you can see what the questions look like when they have real answers.

You already check the answers

Most buyers do their own homework, and the survey says so.

TrustRadius found that 94% of buyers who used AI in their research fact check its answers at least some of the time, in that same survey of 1,862 buyers. The same report found only 13% of buyers used analyst reports to decide, which TrustRadius says is down 63% from an earlier edition of its own survey. You are reading the vendor's own pages instead. That is the right move, and below is where to look on those pages.

Ask what uptime really means

The marketing page and the contract can carry two different numbers.

Retell AI is a company that sells phone agents. Its reliability docs say the company guarantees more than 99.9% uptime, in Retell's own words on that page. Its Terms of Service, the document that governs the deal, commit to 99.5%, and that number excludes scheduled maintenance of up to 6 hours a month and force majeure, again per Retell's own terms page.

Here is what the gap means on a 43,200 minute month, worked out from the figures in Retell's terms. At 99.9% the vendor can be down 43 minutes before it breaks its promise. At 99.5% it can be down 216 minutes, which is 3.6 hours, before it breaks its promise, and the 6 hours of maintenance sit on top of that. Ask every vendor for the uptime number in the contract, not the one on the home page.

Ask who pays when it fails

The answer is usually capped low.

Retell's Terms of Service cap its liability at the greater of the fees you paid in the prior 12 months or $100, per Retell's own terms page. If your agent was down on the busiest day of your week, that cap is your ceiling. Every fee is nonrefundable under the same Retell terms, and no clause lets a customer end the deal early for convenience. Disputes go to Delaware courts, with a class action waiver and a jury waiver, per the same document.

Ask how you cancel

Read the renewal clause before you sign, not after.

Retell's subscription auto renews unless you delete the workspace or remove the subscription items before the period ends, per Retell's own Terms of Service. That means the cancel button is not a button. It is a deletion. Ask your vendor to show you, on a call, exactly what you click to stop paying and what happens to your call logs when you click it.

Ask where the recordings go

Your calls pass through the agent vendor and the model vendor, and each has its own rule.

Retell's terms say customers own the content they submit, but Retell may use aggregated data with identities removed for operating, improving and developing the services, per Retell's own Terms of Service. The phone agent then sends the words to a language model vendor. OpenAI's enterprise privacy page says it does not use business data for training by default, and that it may keep API inputs and outputs for up to 30 days to identify abuse, with zero retention available on request for eligible cases, per OpenAI's own page. Anthropic's help center says it keeps prompts and outputs for covered models for 30 days for safety work, deletes them after unless flagged, and offers zero retention for qualifying workspaces, per Anthropic's own article.

So ask your vendor these things. Who is the model vendor behind the agent. How many days do they keep my calls. Can I get zero retention in writing.

Ask for the full price per minute

The sticker number is the smallest number on the page.

Retell's pricing page lists a phone agent at $0.07 to $0.31 a minute all in, with a default stack around $0.11 a minute, per Retell's own pricing page. That breaks down as $0.055 a minute for voice infrastructure, $0.015 for telephony, $0.0016 to $0.38 for the language model and $0.015 to $0.040 for text to speech, per the same page. Silence is billed, and billing runs on accumulated minutes at the end of each cycle, per the same page.

Then come the add ons. Retell's pricing page lists a knowledge base at $0.005 a minute extra, AI QA at $0.10 a minute after the first 100 minutes, concurrency beyond 20 calls at $8 per line per month, a verified phone number at $10 per number per month, and an enterprise stable cluster at $0.02 a minute extra, per Retell's pricing and reliability pages. Ask your vendor for the price with every add on you will actually turn on.

What the contract says

Here is the worked example in one place, with a column for your own vendor.

Basis: every Retell figure is from Retell's own Terms of Service, pricing page and reliability docs on the day we read them. The OpenAI and Anthropic figures are from each company's own published privacy or help pages on the same day. The downtime hours are arithmetic on a 43,200 minute month applied to the Retell terms. Vendors change these pages without notice, so read them again before you sign.

What we got wrong

I started this piece thinking most buyers get burned, and the survey says otherwise.

TrustRadius found 75% of buyers who bought an AI tool said it lived up to expectations, in the same survey of 1,862 buyers. So these questions are for the other 25%, and for keeping you out of that group. I also leaned on one vendor read on one day. The gap between Retell's 99.9% docs and its 99.5% terms is one company, not proof the whole market does it, and other vendors may match their marketing to their contract. And the 30 day retention at OpenAI and Anthropic is for safety checks with no training by default, which is more protective than I assumed going in.

If you would rather not read terms of service on your phone between jobs, book the audit at vusedesk.com. We read the contract, the pricing page and the data policy for the vendor you are considering and tell you what to ask before you sign. A consult is $199.