Welcome to the CIO Due-Diligence Committee.
Every software vendor claims their product is powered by "revolutionary AI." Your job as Technology Managers is to look past the buzzwords, identify what technology is actually under the hood, and spot costly "AI washing" before signing an enterprise contract.
The Technology Spectrum You Will Evaluate
Deterministic if/then rules, keyword matching, and basic sensor thresholds. Fast and cheap, but not AI.
Mathematical heuristics & combinatorial optimization (e.g., routing, scheduling). Solves massive math problems without neural nets.
Supervised/unsupervised models trained on historical tabular data to score risk, detect fraud, or recommend items.
Models interpreting camera feeds, spatial sensors, or learning physical actions via Reinforcement Learning.
Foundation models generating text, code, or images. Powerful for unstructured synthesis, but prone to hallucinations.
Systems marketed as autonomous AI that secretly rely on manual human contractors or legacy scripts behind the curtain.
Amazon Go — "Just Walk Out" Autonomous Checkout
Enterprise Retail Transformation Pitch
? Committee Verdict: What is ACTUALLY under the hood?
Select an option to lock in your auditCIO Executive Briefing
Chief Technology Strategist
Audit Results by Case
- The "LLM Hammer" Problem: Why do so many companies try to force Generative AI/LLMs onto problems better solved by Predictive ML or Operations Research?
- Cost vs. Interpretability: In regulated industries (banking, healthcare, HR), why might a simple logistic regression or rule-based model beat a deep neural network?
- Spotting "AI Washing": What is the biggest red flag in a vendor's sales deck that signals human-in-the-loop labor or basic automation disguised as AI?