Hiring an AI development company: ten questions and the red flags

In 2026 every development shop has "AI" on its homepage, including this one. Gartner estimated in 2025 that only about 130 of the thousands of vendors selling agentic AI offer the real thing. You cannot tell the difference from a website. You can from the answers to ten questions.

Ten questions to ask on the first call

• Show me something you built that is live and used by real people. Not a demo, not a prototype.
• Who will write the code, and is that the person on this call?
• How do you test an AI feature before real users see it? Ask to see a test set.
• What happens when the AI is wrong? Show me the hand-over to a person.
• What will it cost to run each month at our volume, not just to build?
• What will you cut from our scope, and why?
• Do we own the code, the model accounts and the data from day one, or on final payment?
• How do you handle payments, sign-in and data-access rules? Who reviews them?
• How will we see progress between milestones?
• Can I talk to a client who launched with you, and one whose project went badly?

Red flags that should end the call

• An accuracy number promised before anyone has looked at your data.
• A complex agent promised in two weeks with no scope document.
• "It depends" as the whole answer to price, with no list of what it depends on.
• No running-cost estimate.
• Code ownership that transfers only on final payment.
• The person selling will not be the person building, and nobody will name who is.

Answers that should reassure you

A written scope with a cut list before any code. A fixed price for a clearly scoped build. Something clickable early, and updates you do not have to chase. Admitting what they do not do. A studio that tells you an off-the-shelf tool would serve you better is one that will also tell you when the build is going wrong.

Ask every shortlisted studio the same ten questions and compare the answers side by side. The differences show up fast.

How we answer them

Four products you can look up: Offline by Happy Hour, KrutAI, Loopwave and A2A Point. The engineer who scopes your build writes the code. A clearly scoped Production MVP is $3,999 fixed, you own every account from day one, and you get a two-minute Loom every 48 hours. If we are the wrong fit, the page called Who we are not for says so before you have to ask.