Competitive differentiation, cost optimization, digital transformation, and operational efficiency are just some of your strategic priorities that generative AI (Gen AI) promises to support.
Your stakeholders are ready to invest in Gen AI vendors, to investigate and demonstrate opportunities in your teams, products, and services with Gen AI embedded.
Gen AI is new to your organization, and the lack of internal capabilities makes it difficult to navigate the vast Gen AI marketplace and develop the right criteria to select the appropriate solutions.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Don’t get caught in the hype; focus on the problem. Gen AI marketing can take your focus away from what is important. Put the human front and center to understand how Gen AI tools can be integrated and embedded into a worker’s activities and workflows and how they drive organizational, departmental, and individual value.
Treat Gen AI as any other technology in IT procurement. Much of the selection criteria (e.g. features and functionalities, security, vendor viability) in traditional vendor selection still apply for Gen AI. Adjust your current vendor selection practice to accommodate the context, intricacies, and nuances of Gen AI using your existing selection framework and methodologies as a starting point.
Innovate with a purpose. Reinventing the wheel will lower your chances of success. Stick to proven use cases to understand their value and fit in your organization and how your teams can transform the way they work. Use your lessons learned to discover scaling opportunities.
Position your prospective vendor as a partner and not just a trainer. Success goes beyond the pilot. It involves the development of a practice that is often supported and supplied with tailored tactics and on-hand advice from the vendor.

Impact and Result

Outline the value you expect to gain. Discuss current business and IT priorities, use cases, and value opportunities to determine what to expect from Gen AI tools.
Define your vendor and tooling selection criteria. Clarify the driving factors in your evaluation of the Gen AI solution using your existing vendor evaluation practices as a starting point.
- Use Info-Tech’s Generative AI Vendor Selection Criteria Workbook to define and prioritize the criteria that will influence vendor selection.

Select Your Generative AI Vendor Research & Tools

1. Select Your Generative AI Vendor Storyboard – A guide to determine the criteria to select a vendor that will meet your Gen AI needs.

This research walks you through vendor selection factors and considerations as you prepare your teams to begin your vendor procurement process.

2. Generative AI Vendor Selection Criteria Workbook – A tool to help you define the factors in your vendor scoring framework.

Use this tool to document the key factors to consider in the scoring and comparison of prospective vendors and tools. It also contains a canvas to identify problems and the objectives and scope of your Gen AI initiative.

Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

9.3/10

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Navigator Gas

Guided Implementation

10/10

$3,420

Navigator Gas

Guided Implementation

9/10

$2,907

Clear advice and understanding for is to build on. Only downside is time zone differences meaning.a slight inflexibility when arranging meetings

Navigator Gas

Guided Implementation

9/10

$17,100

Select Your Generative AI Vendor

Choose the right tool and vendor by preparing the right selection criteria.

Analyst Perspective

	Look past the Gen AI hype AI continues to be an important focus area for organizations looking to optimize, modernize, and innovate. The industry is seeing an increasing number of AI capabilities embedded in organizations over the past five years (McKinsey, 2022). During this time, generative AI (Gen AI) has matured to the point that it is being successfully embedded in key business and IT capabilities. Many vendors acknowledge these opportunities and are building Gen AI into their products. However, organizations are having trouble selecting what is right for them. The rapid evolution of Gen AI technologies and constantly changing vendor and open-source landscape often impede the learning, understanding, and implementation of Gen AI. Stick with brands you know and trust to ensure you are getting the support you need. Focus on the use cases that matter to your end users and instill confidence for further adoption while minimizing complexity, cost, and risk as much as possible.
Andrew Kum-Seun Research Director, Application Delivery & Management Info-Tech Research Group

Bhavya Vora Research Analyst, Special Projects Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge	Common Obstacles	Info-Tech’s Approach
Competitive differentiation, cost optimization, digital transformation, and operational efficiency are just some of your strategic priorities that generative AI (Gen AI) promises to support. Your stakeholders are ready to invest in Gen AI vendors and to investigate and demonstrate opportunities in your teams, products, and services with Gen AI embedded. Gen AI is new to your organization. The lack of internal capabilities to assess, select, and procure Gen AI tools creates confusion on navigating the vast Gen AI marketplace and developing the right criteria to select the appropriate solutions.	The Gen AI marketplace is very broad and diverse and is constantly changing. Finding the right tools is confusing and overwhelming. Gen AI can generate significant organizational changes, and current systems, processes, and roles may not be ready or able to adopt them. Vendors may not be able to accommodate your way of working in the configuration, implementation, and operational support of their tools. Many Gen AI solutions are currently open-source, but teams and stakeholders can be hesitant about its adoption, its long-term viability, the risks, and the costs of ongoing support. Open-source needs skills beyond what commercial software typically requires.	Outline the value you expect to gain. Discuss current business and IT priorities, use cases, and value opportunities to determine what to expect from Gen AI tools. Define your vendor and tooling selection criteria. Clarify the driving factors in your evaluation of Gen AI solution using your existing vendor evaluation practices as a starting point. Use Info-Tech’s Generative AI Vendor Selection Criteria Workbook to define and prioritize the selection criteria that will influence vendor selection.

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

Competitive differentiation, cost optimization, digital transformation, and operational efficiency are just some of your strategic priorities that generative AI (Gen AI) promises to support.

Your stakeholders are ready to invest in Gen AI vendors and to investigate and demonstrate opportunities in your teams, products, and services with Gen AI embedded.

Gen AI is new to your organization. The lack of internal capabilities to assess, select, and procure Gen AI tools creates confusion on navigating the vast Gen AI marketplace and developing the right criteria to select the appropriate solutions.

The Gen AI marketplace is very broad and diverse and is constantly changing. Finding the right tools is confusing and overwhelming.

Gen AI can generate significant organizational changes, and current systems, processes, and roles may not be ready or able to adopt them. Vendors may not be able to accommodate your way of working in the configuration, implementation, and operational support of their tools.

Many Gen AI solutions are currently open-source, but teams and stakeholders can be hesitant about its adoption, its long-term viability, the risks, and the costs of ongoing support. Open-source needs skills beyond what commercial software typically requires.

Outline the value you expect to gain. Discuss current business and IT priorities, use cases, and value opportunities to determine what to expect from Gen AI tools.
Define your vendor and tooling selection criteria. Clarify the driving factors in your evaluation of Gen AI solution using your existing vendor evaluation practices as a starting point.

Use Info-Tech’s Generative AI Vendor Selection Criteria Workbook to define and prioritize the selection criteria that will influence vendor selection.

Insight Summary

Overarching Info-Tech Insight

Invest in the Gen AI tools that strike an acceptable balance between your use cases and the risks and costs of implementing and operating them. Vendors with ready-to-use solutions, a proven track record, and canned templates of demonstratable use cases are good starting points. Position your Gen AI tool pilots to assess the organizational fit of Gen AI and build the foundational competencies to support it.

Don’t get caught in the hype; focus on the problem.

Gen AI marketing can take your focus away from what is important. Put the human front and center to understand how Gen AI tools can be integrated and embedded into a worker’s activities and workflows and how it drives organizational, department, and individual value.

Treat Gen AI as any other technology in IT procurement.

Much of the selection criteria (e.g. features and functionalities, security, vendor viability) in traditional vendor selection still apply for Gen AI. Adjust your current vendor selection practice to accommodate the context, intricacies and nuances of Gen AI using your existing selection framework and methodologies as a starting point.

Innovate with a purpose.

Do not reinvent the wheel and lower your risk of success. Stick to the use cases proven successful in your prospective Gen AI vendor to understand their value and fit in your organization and how your teams can transform the way they work. Use your lessons learned to discover scaling opportunities.

Position your prospective vendor as a partner and not just a trainer.

Success goes beyond the pilot. It involves the development of a practice that is often supported and supplied with tailored tactics and on-hand advice from the vendor.

What is Gen AI?

	Generative AI (Gen AI) A form of ML whereby, in response to prompts, a Gen AI platform can generate new output based on the data it has been trained on. Depending on its foundational model, a Gen AI platform will provide different modalities and use case applications.
	Machine Learning (ML) The AI system is instructed to search for patterns in a dataset and then make predictions based on that set. In this way, the system learns to provide accurate content over time. This requires a supervised intervention if the data is inaccurate. Deep learning is self-supervised and does not require intervention.
	Artificial Intelligence (AI) A field of computer science that focuses on building systems to imitate human behavior. Not all AI systems have learning behavior; many systems (such as customer service chatbots) operate on preset rules.

See Info-Tech’s Generative AI: Market Primer for more information.

Info-Tech Insight
Many vendors have jumped on Gen AI as the latest marketing buzzword. When vendors claim to offer Gen AI functionality, pin down what exactly is generative about it. The solution must be able to induce new outputs from inputted data via self-supervision – not trained to produce certain outputs based on certain inputs.

Organizations are eager to adopt Gen AI, yet success remains elusive

Scalability presents a significant challenge

About three-quarters (76%) of C-suite executives that leverage AI to achieve their growth objectives report they struggle with how to scale (Accenture, 2019; N=1,500).

Inevitable leap from experimentation to implementation

Three-quarters (75%) of C-level executives believe if they don’t move beyond experimentation to aggressively deploy AI across their organizations they risk going out of business by 2025 (Accenture, 2019; N=1,500).

The Gen AI marketplace is large and fragmented

Lack of transparency

76% of CEOs are most concerned with the potential for bias and lack of transparency when it comes to AI adoption (PwC, 2018).

Unconventional pricing standards

Many organizations still find the technology to be prohibitively expensive. Only the top 1% of companies can comfortably afford the latest tools (CPA Practice Advisor, 2022).

Lack of adequate regulation

64% of CEOs are concerned with compliance and regulation challenges within their industry (PwC, 2018).

Unstable marketplace, poised for growth

Up to the year of 2030, the AI marketplace is expected to grow at a CAGR of 38.1% (Bloomberg, 2023).

Diverse vendor landscape

There are over 58,000 vendors in the AI marketplace (Traxcn, 2023).

See Info-Tech’s Generative AI: Market Primer for more information.

Selecting the right Gen AI vendor is crucial

Organizations often get caught in the marketing hype and overpromises of vendors. This motivation leads some organizations to implement a solution only to find out that it does not fit their needs. A common reason this situation happens is failing to ask the right questions up-front to realize the true capacity and fit of a solution versus its marketing gimmick.

Implementing Gen AI is an organization-wide effort	Building Gen AI responsibly mitigates the risk	Your vendor is your implementation partner
Seventy percent of a company’s AI scaling efforts mount to business and people transformation (Boston Consulting Group, 2023). Since a company is significantly leveraged during AI transitioning, it’s important to make efficient use of resources.	At this stage, the barrier to widespread AI deployment is no longer the technology itself; rather, it’s a set of challenges that ironically are far more human: ethics, governance, and human values (MIT Technology Review, 2020). Access to sensitive data makes it crucial to partner with the right vendor.	Due to the complexity and nascency of this space, the ecosystem of AI implementation partners is not as mature as in other technology domains. In the case of AI, selecting the vendor is equivalent to selecting your implementation partner.

Understand the challenges of selecting Gen AI vendor

Lack of internal resources to support Gen AI

Lack of technical Gen AI expertise
Unsuitable technology infrastructure and poor data quality

Uncertainty in a rapidly evolving space

Business leaders still exploring possibilities of how Gen AI fits in
Lack of clarity with respect to Gen AI scope

Lack of success stories

Vendors lack experience and proven track record
Nascent development; difficult to define successful adoption

Fragmented market with asymmetric information

Vendors offering siloed tools, that don’t integrate well with others
Doubts over accuracy and claims of functionality

Organizational resistance

Significant retraining potentially required
Fear of being replaced

See our Rapid Application Selection Framework research for more information on selecting applications.

See our Drive Successful Sourcing Outcomes With a Robust RFP Process research for more information.

Selecting a Gen AI vendor does not have to be complicated

Key considerations while navigating the Gen AI marketplace

Maintain human-in-the-loop
Third-party assessments and references
Open-source vs. commercial solutions
Established organization vs. new entrant
Refer to successful industry use cases
Set vendor performance metrics

Recommended criteria to evaluate prospective Gen AI vendors

Features & Functionalities
Customization & Flexibility
Support & Maintenance
Security
Vendor Viability & Vision
Affordability
Ease of Integration & Deployment
Scalability

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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