Five questions that go beyond the demo
These are the five questions to put to any vendor before you buy. To help you read the answers, we asked Tobiasz Kulesza, Head of Client Growth at NoA Ignite, what he listens for when he’s comparing vendors.
First, why only five?
Tobiasz says: "There are a hundred things you could ask, but most of them do not separate one platform from another. Everybody has a demo. Everybody has a roadmap. These five are really one question asked from different angles. What happens to the experience when the system is under stress? Not on the happy path in a sales meeting, but on the day something goes wrong."
1. Where does the agent actually run?
Inside the platform, or as a thin layer calling out to a model somewhere else. If it runs inside, your content never leaves the system. Fewer integrations, a shorter security review, one supplier to call when something breaks. The trade is that you inherit whichever model the vendor chose. If it runs outside, you gain flexibility over cost and quality, and take on the data path that comes with it. Just know which one you are buying, and ask whether you can swap the model when a better one arrives.
2. Can it act without a human starting it?
Prompted only means you are buying a productivity tool. Measure it in hours saved and expect adoption to be the hard part. If it can act on a schedule or a trigger, you are buying an operational system. That needs organized content, an owner, monitoring, and a plan for when it goes down. Both are fine, but they are not the same purchase.
3. Can it chain steps and carry context between them?
A system that does one clever thing and then forgets is assisted, even if it is promoted as more. If it can chain, ask what happens when a step fails. A good answer involves rolling the whole run back cleanly. A vague answer means half-finished work scattered across a live site, which is worse than no work at all!
4. Are the approval gates explicit and configurable?
Ask to see where they are set, then ask what happens by default. Gates on by default, configurable per content type, means a vendor who has met a real-life marketing team. You can relax the rules on internal pages and stay strict on anything customer-facing. A single global switch means choosing between checking everything and checking nothing. That doesn't scale very well.
5. When it publishes something wrong, who reverses it, and how quickly?
A strong answer is specific. Version history at item level, one-click revert, an audit log naming the agent, the instruction behind it, and every item touched. A weak answer sounds like restoring from a backup, which means a ticket and a wait while the problem sits live.
