What to Ask Your Vendor When Evaluating Agentic AI Document Extraction
Introduction — The High Stakes (and Higher Costs) of Vendor Due Diligence
Forget the slick demo — in regulated industries, document extraction isn’t innovation, it’s liability until proven otherwise. We’ve all seen the cycle: polished proof-of-concepts, sweeping promises about “AI that learns,” and then the post-go-live crash where the invoices for remediation and penalties start rolling in.
In one real-world case, a $300M healthcare provider deployed an “autonomous” extraction engine that misclassified PHI. The fallout? $15M in regulatory fines and months of reputational damage. Agentic AI can be transformative — adaptive, context-aware, self-directed — but without rigorous due diligence, its brilliance quickly becomes your liability.
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 → Audit trails, certifications (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001), data governance, traceability.
- CFOs & Budget Authorities → Real ROI vs. slideware, exposure to hidden costs, and balance-sheet risk if compliance fails. Translation: Will savings survive penalties, rework, and litigation?
Shared objective: speed-to-value without converting operational risk into financial risk.
Five Non-Negotiables in Enterprise Document AI
Contrarian baseline: If it isn’t independently verified, it’s marketing.
1. Compliance & Security
Look past the logo wall. Ask for current attestations (SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, ISO 27001, etc.), evidence of controls, encryption in transit/at rest, key management, breach playbooks, and immutable audit logs. If the answer is “we’re compliance-ready,” you’re not.
2. Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) Accuracy — With SLAs
Agentic ≠ unsupervised. In regulated workflows, HITL is the guardrail. Demand KPIs and SLAs on field-level accuracy and exception handling, tied to your documents (claims, invoices, KYC, lab orders).
Contrarian take: Anyone selling “100% automation” for regulated extraction is selling regulatory fiction.
3. Go-Live Timelines (Weeks, Not Quarters)
Speed matters — so does truth. Push for deliverables that prove production readiness within weeks (golden dataset fit, baseline accuracy, exception routing). If the vendor can’t show working outcomes by Day 30–45, your opportunity cost snowballs — CFOs should model that loss.
4. Integration Readiness (Where Value Actually Happens)
No integration, no ROI. Ask for named prior integrations with SAP/Oracle (ERP), Epic/Cerner (EMR), Ellie Mae/ICE (LOS), and leading CLM platforms, plus patterns and reusable connectors.
If the integration story depends on “quick custom scripts,” expect hidden services spend and brittle operations.
5. Ongoing Support & Lock-In Risk
Your exit is part of your entry. Get data portability specifics, model ownership clarity, IP clauses, and the off-ramp runbook in writing.
Contrarian truth: A brilliant model inside an inflexible contract is a financial liability, not a moat.
Ten Critical Questions Every Vendor Must Answer (Verbatim)
Make these the spine of your RFP, your demo script, and your reference checks:
- Compliance Readiness: Provide proof of SOC 2/HIPAA/GDPR/ISO from the last 12 months and map controls to our use case.
- Auditability: Show how your platform creates tamper-evident audit trails for each document and field.
- Accuracy Guarantees: What KPIs/SLAs will you contractually commit to for our document types?
- ROI Evidence: Provide quantified results from $100M+ regulated enterprises (time-to-value, rework reduction, error rate deltas).
- Exit Strategy: What happens to our data, models, labels, and prompts if we terminate? In what format, how fast, and at what cost
- Integration Proof: Which ERP/EMR/LOS/CLM systems have you integrated with? Provide architectures and references.
- Speed-to-Value: What’s the median timeline from contract to production traffic for firms like ours?
- Human Oversight: Where exactly is HITL applied? Who approves exceptions? How are thresholds tuned?
- Scalability & Performance: Share throughput benchmarks and failure modes under peak loads.
- Post-Go-Live Support: Define runbooks, SLOs, upgrade cadence, and how your team adapts to regulatory changes.
If answers aren’t specific and evidenced, you’re evaluating risk, not a solution.
Red Flags vs. Green Lights During Demos & RFPs
Red Flags (Plan to Walk)
- “Compliance-ready” without independent attestations or control mapping.
- Black-box explanations; no field-level audit trails.
- “Zero human involvement.” In regulated settings, that’s non-compliant by design.
- Integration hand-waving — everything is a “simple connector.”
- Opaque pricing; change orders for basics; data egress fees that trap you.
Green Lights (Lean In)
- Fresh SOC 2/HIPAA/GDPR/ISO documents and a willingness to walk through controls.
- Live demo of traceability from raw doc → extracted fields → reviewer actions → system of record.
- References in your industry and scale band, with quantified before/after metrics.
- Clear playbooks for HITL, exception routing, and model updates.
- Exit mechanics documented: formats, timelines, costs, and support.
CFO lens: Ask to see unit economics at scale (cost per document at X volume, % manual touch, re-process rates). If the math only works in the marketing deck, it doesn’t work.
The Hard Truth (Contrarian Summary)
- Great AI with bad governance becomes expensive risk.
- “Autonomous” is a feature; “audit-ready” is a requirement.
- Speed without integration is theater.
- If you can’t exit cleanly, you never really bought a solution — you rented a dependency.
Conclusion — Why Transparent Vendors Like V2Solutions Stand Apart
If a vendor can’t answer the ten questions above with evidence, you’re not buying compliance-ready AI — you’re buying regulatory and financial exposure. In markets where fines, rework, and reputational damage can erase years of margin, diligence is strategy.
V2Solutions brings more than two decades of enterprise delivery to regulated environments with a partner-not-vendor stance:
- Transparency: No black-box promises — field-level auditability is standard.
- Enterprise Security: Practices aligned to SOC 2 and HIPAA from day one.
- Speed-to-Value: Weeks, not quarters — without Big Four overhead.
- Optionality: Open architectures, clear data portability, and contract flexibility.
Procurement, IT, Compliance, and Finance leaders who insist on evidence over adjectives consistently ship safer programs, faster. That’s the edge.
FAQs
Agentic AI goes beyond rule-based automation by adapting to context, self-directing tasks, and learning from patterns. In document extraction, it means systems that can handle unstructured data, exceptions, and evolving document formats — but only if paired with compliance-ready governance. For a deeper comparison with OCR and RPA, see our article: Agentic AI Document Extraction vs. OCR vs. RPA: What’s the Difference (and Why It Matters for Enterprises).
Because even a single misclassified document can trigger regulatory violations. For example, mislabeling protected health information (PHI) or financial records can result in HIPAA or SOX penalties worth millions. That’s why procurement and compliance teams must ask vendors for SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR certifications.
Ensure your contract specifies data portability, model ownership, and exit strategies. A truly enterprise-grade vendor will define formats, timelines, and costs for a clean off-ramp. Lock-in is a financial liability masquerading as innovation.
Because no AI is perfect, especially in regulated industries. HITL ensures compliance, accuracy, and auditability by validating exceptions and fine-tuning thresholds. Vendors promising “zero human oversight” in regulated use cases are selling regulatory risk.