Governance and explainability, integration with existing systems, security posture, and proven ROI in a comparable use case now matter more than model benchmarks alone, since most vendors in a category use comparable underlying models.

Procurement, security, and legal stakeholders shift the evaluation toward risk and defensibility — asking about auditability, data handling, and vendor dependency — which often differs from the criteria the original internal champion prioritized.

Ask for a live audit trail of a specific past decision, whether the platform can enforce an actual approval policy inside a workflow, and what happens to data and workflows if the underlying model changes.

Most vendors in a given category rely on comparable underlying models, so model quality has become a baseline expectation rather than a differentiator. Buyers now focus their evaluation on governance, integration, and proven ROI instead.