How to Spot AI Scams, Skip the PowerPoint Engineering and Work Only with Legit AI Companies

A Non-Techie’s Guide to Spotting AI Sales Noise

Countless startups and even well-known vendors promise “revolutionary” AI products: chatbots that supposedly think like humans, agents that will replace entire teams, automatically generated dashboards that promise instant insight. On a slide deck, it all looks magical but how can one tell if that is just a sales pitch or the solution is actually worth the money? Most organisations don’t have an in-house AI expert, which makes it easy to overpay for thin wrappers around ChatGPT, recycled open-source code, or PoCs that are doomed to fail simply because they were not technically feasible. After years of vetting solutions from garage startups to hyperscalers, I’ve learned that company’s size is no guarantee of substance; the same red-flag patterns appear everywhere. The good news is that those patterns are easy to spot once you know what to look for. In this post I propose an easy-to-use checklist that helps non-tech people test AI offers, bargain for a fair price, and show vendors they can’t be fooled. Each item is accompanied by an example from real life.