Don’t buy seats, buy outcomes.
AI agents can now resolve customer requests from start to finish, but a demo won’t tell you which ones will hold up in production. The guide gives you the questions to ask, the tests to run, and scorecards to compare vendors side by side.
“All that data created a record, but not an understanding.”Jonathan Corbin, Founder and CEO, Maven AGI
For 25 years, you paid for a tool to help with the work.
Software has always been judged by how well it helps your employees do the work, so pricing it per person made sense.
AI agents do the work themselves. They answer the question, issue the refund, and close the ticket. This is Service as Software, and how you evaluate and pay for it needs to change.
Instead of buying tools for your team to use, you buy the finished work and pay for results.
What changes when software does the work
Pricing is moving from access to results.
First you paid per person, then per message or conversation. Now some vendors charge only when a predetermined outcome is achieved.
Once one vendor charges for results, every other vendor has to explain why they don’t.
In the guide: how to get any vendor to price on results.Older systems simply remember what happened. Knowledge graphs remember why.
Your helpdesk knows a refund was issued, but it doesn’t know what your best agent did to make it right. Keeping that reasoning is what makes every future answer better. We call that record the Graph of Record.
Make sure you own that history. If the vendor keeps it, you pay twice.
In the guide: the contract clause that keeps your decision history yours.Trust decides how much AI can handle.
Companies let AI take on more when they can see what it did and why, and when it learns from every correction. That visibility, more than a smarter model, is what lets AI handle more.
Flip each switch to see how the dial moves.
In the guide: the live test that shows whether a vendor can explain any action.Service as Software changes the buying criteria. Know what to ask.
19 evaluation criteria, 14 discovery questions, and scorecards for text and voice. Written for leaders in support, CX, sales and marketing operations, and AI programs. In the last section, we score Maven against the same checklist, weak spots included.
- 01Define what you’re actually buying
- 02Evaluation criteria, text and voice
- 03Vendor landscape by capability
- 04Questions to ask during discovery
- 05Evaluation scorecards
- 06Common pitfalls
- 07What this does to your operation
- 08Why this evaluation matters now
- 09How Maven answers these criteria We grade ourselves
Get the buyer’s guide
Free. We’ll email it to you right away.