What to Ask Your Vendor When
Evaluating Agentic AI
Document Extraction
The definitive due diligence guide for regulated industries and enterprise compliance
In regulated environments, document extraction must prove compliance and reliability before it promises innovation. The common pattern—polished demos followed by hard-to-measure outcomes—creates risk for Procurement, IT, Compliance, and Finance. This checklist helps you separate marketecture from production-ready capabilities, so speed doesn’t come at the expense of auditability.
Executive summary: Use the Five Non-Negotiables to verify security, oversight, integration, and portability; then run the Ten Vendor Questions to anchor demos, pilots, and RFPs. Aim for measurable outcomes in 30–45 days with clear governance.
Who’s at the Table — Procurement, IT, Compliance… and Finance
Great evaluations are cross-functional by design. Each leader brings a different kind of risk radar:
Procurement → Total cost of ownership, contract flexibility, no lock-in.
IT Directors & CTOs → Integration with ERP/EMR/LOS/CLM, scalability, performance, security architecture.
Compliance Officers → Attestations, data governance, traceability, and audit readiness.
CFOs & Budget Authorities → Real ROI vs. slideware, exposure to hidden costs, and balance-sheet risk.
Shared objective: accelerate value while keeping operational and regulatory risk within clearly defined guardrails.
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Five Non-Negotiables for Enterprise Document AI
1) Compliance & Security
Look for current attestations/certifications aligned to your use case: SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA (as applicable), and GDPR. Confirm encryption in transit/at rest, key management, data residency, and immutable audit logs.
How to verify: request most-recent reports (≤12 months), control mappings to your scenario, pen-test or vulnerability summary, data-flow diagrams, and a sample immutable audit log.
2) Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) with SLAs
Agentic AI still needs governed oversight in regulated workflows. Define field-level accuracy targets on your golden datasets, acceptable manual-touch rates, reviewer SLAs, and exception-handling pathways.
How to verify: ask for baseline accuracy on your sample docs, proposed ≤5–10% manual touch for steady state, reviewer SLA ≤ 4 hours, and change-management runbooks.
3) Time-to-Value (Weeks, Not Quarters)
Favor vendors who demonstrate production-adjacent outcomes quickly—dataset fit, exception routing, and posting to your system of record in 30–45 days.
How to verify: request a pilot timeline with dated deliverables (Week 1 data fit, Week 2 integration path, Week 3 HITL tuning, Week 4–6 production slice) and exit criteria tied to KPIs.
4) Integration Readiness
ROI is realized through reliable handoffs to ERP/EMR/LOS/CLM and content systems. Look for proven connectors and patterns (event webhooks, API ingestion, SFTP fallbacks, iPaaS), plus auth modes (OAuth 2.0 client credentials).
How to verify: ask for named prior integrations, sample payloads/schemas, retry/queuing patterns, and monitoring dashboards.
5) Portability & Commercial Clarity
Ensure you can export data and artifacts (JSON/CSV, PDF/XML as needed), understand model ownership, and have a clear off-ramp.
How to verify: request contract language covering data portability, export timelines/costs, artifact scope (prompts, label schemas, and model artifacts where applicable), and deletion certificates.
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Integration Reference Flow
Source documents → pre-processing/normalization → extraction → HITL review (thresholds & exception queues) → validation → post to system of record → immutable audit log + metrics.
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Ten Critical Questions Every Vendor Should Answer
Compliance & Governance
Provide evidence for SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA (as applicable), and GDPR within the last 12 months, mapped to our use case.
Show how auditability works end-to-end (tamper-evident logs at document/field level).
How do you detect and manage model drift and regulatory/policy changes?
Accuracy & Oversight
Which KPIs/SLAs will you commit to for our document classes (field accuracy, exception rate, reviewer SLA)?
Where is HITL applied, how are thresholds tuned, and how do reviewer actions feed continuous improvement?
Integration & Performance
Which ERP/EMR/LOS/CLM platforms have you integrated with? Share reference architectures and payload examples.
Provide throughput benchmarks, failure modes under peak loads, and resilience patterns (retries, idempotency).
Time-to-Value
What’s the median timeline from contract to production traffic for firms like ours? Provide a week-by-week plan and exit criteria.
Portability & Commercials
What exports are supported (data, labels, prompts, models where applicable)? In what formats, timelines, and at what cost?
Outline support model: runbooks, SLOs, release cadence, and approach to regulatory updates.
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Signals During Demos & RFPs
Use Caution
“Compliance-ready” claims without current attestations or clear control mapping.
Limited transparency into field-level logs and exception paths.
“Zero human oversight” proposed for regulated use cases.
Vague integration plans or one-off scripts with no resilience patterns.
Pricing without a clear rate card; frequent change orders for common scenarios.
Positive Indicators
Fresh SOC 2 Type II / ISO/IEC 27001 reports and a willingness to walk through controls; HIPAA and GDPR alignment as applicable.
Live traceability demo: raw doc → extracted fields → reviewer actions → system of record → audit log.
Industry-relevant references with quantified before/after metrics.
Clear HITL playbooks and model-update governance.
Documented export/exit mechanics and transparent pricing tiers.
Cost lens : Review unit economics at scale (cost per document at target volumes, % manual touch, re-process rates). Ensure the math holds outside the demo.
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Why Transparent Partners Stand Apart
If a vendor can’t answer the ten questions above with evidence, it’s hard to establish confidence for regulated workloads. In markets where rework and reputational exposure can erase years of margin, diligence becomes strategy.
V2Solutions brings more than two decades of enterprise delivery to regulated environments with a partner-first stance:
Transparency: Field-level auditability and clear metrics.
Enterprise Security: Practices aligned to SOC 2 and HIPAA from day one.
Time-to-Value: Weeks, not quarters—without heavyweight overhead.
Optionality: Open architectures, data portability, and contract flexibility.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is agentic AI in document extraction?
Agentic AI goes beyond rules by adapting to context, self-directing tasks, and learning from patterns. In document extraction, it means handling unstructured data and exceptions—paired with governance to remain audit-ready. For a deeper comparison with OCR and RPA, see: Agentic AI vs. OCR vs. RPA.
Q: Why is compliance the biggest risk in document AI?
Because even a single misclassified document can create exposure. Confirm alignment with SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001, HIPAA (as applicable), and GDPR, and verify how audit trails and controls are implemented.
Q: How can enterprises avoid vendor lock-in?
Ensure your agreement specifies data portability, model/artifact ownership (where applicable), export formats and timelines, and deletion certificates. A mature vendor will document an off-ramp that preserves continuity and compliance.
Q: Why does HITL matter?
No AI is perfect—especially in regulated industries. HITL safeguards accuracy and auditability by validating exceptions and tuning thresholds. “Zero human oversight” is generally not appropriate for regulated workflows.
Ready for Evidence-Based AI Vendor Evaluation?
Use our checklist to structure demos, pilots, and RFPs—so you can move fast with the right guardrails.
Author’s Profile
Dipal Patel
VP Marketing & Research, V2Solutions Dipal Patel is a strategist and innovator at the intersection of AI, requirement engineering, and business growth. With two decades of global experience spanning product strategy, business analysis, and marketing leadership, he has pioneered agentic AI applications and custom GPT solutions that transform how businesses capture requirements and scale operations. Currently serving as VP of Marketing & Research at V2Solutions, Dipal specializes in blending competitive intelligence with automation to accelerate revenue growth. He is passionate about shaping the future of AI-enabled business practices and has also authored two fiction books.