Key Takeaways
- Vendors should proactively provide comprehensive explainers about their AI tools and features.
- Buyers should treat AI disclosures as non-negotiable contracting requirements, similar to security questionnaires.
- Standardized documentation transforms AI procurement from reactive firefighting into proactive risk management.
- Two ready-to-use templates, one for vendors and one for buyers, are available in the article below.
The AI procurement era is here. Leadership wants enterprise-wide LLM deployments. HR teams are considering AI recruiters. Engineers ask for coding assistants. And that means that lawyers and contracts professionals find themselves deciphering marketing materials, following hyperlink trails, and extracting fragmented answers from vendors who either don’t understand their own architecture or prefer not to explain it.
AI contracting shouldn’t feel like detective work. When vendors proactively share comprehensive documentation about their AI products and features, they signal maturity and build trust. When buyers demand clear answers about AI tools, they gain leverage and establish a framework for evaluation and comparison of tools. And when contract professionals standardize the process, AI procurement transforms from bottleneck to strategic advantage.
Whether you sit on the vendor side or the buyer side, the solution is the same: make AI disclosures the starting point for contracting.
Why Vendors Should Lead With AI Information
To all the vendors: You don’t need to wait to be asked to provide information on your AI features and tools. Your team should enter every prospect and client conversation armed with a clear, comprehensive AI disclosure that covers the essentials, including what the AI does, which model powers it, how the model is deployed, and explicit assurances about training data usage and data retention.
Why does this matter?
Control the narrative before it controls you.
Every unanswered question about your AI becomes an invitation for buyer doubt. Without documentation, you allow buyers to fill gaps with worst-case assumptions and their legal team’s most conservative interpretations. Each question mark becomes a reason to slow down or loop in skeptical stakeholders. Supply structured answers early, and you frame the conversation on your terms.
The questions are coming anyway.
We’ve reached a point where standard AI due diligence (at least based on current technology) follows a fairly predictable checklist that extends beyond traditional SaaS reviews. What model is being used? How is the model deployed? Is customer data used to train the vendor’s (or a third-party’s) models? If you fail to anticipate these questions, you look unprepared. If you come armed with documentation, you look experienced. You know the questions are coming; why let buyers grow frustrated hunting for answers?
Accelerate deals by collapsing decision cycles.
AI reviews involve multiple stakeholders, including procurement, legal, IT, compliance, and information security. Each queues up their own discovery process, which can stretch deals across months and quarters. But comprehensive documentation can shortcut this process. Buyers can socialize answers internally, build consensus, and align on a smaller list of follow ups for the vendor. Every week you shave off the sales cycle compounds into faster close rates, better forecasting, and more predictable revenue. AI documentation can be used as a competitive weapon.
Signal you actually understand AI.
Many vendors claim to be an AI company without real expertise or understanding. Savvy buyers smell this immediately. When a vendor provides detailed documentation, it proves competence and demonstrates you’ve mapped data flows, thought through edge cases, and understand your technology. In a market flooded with AI-washed products, being able to answer “Which model?” “Where does the data go?” and “How long do you keep it?” separates serious vendors from pretenders. In a crowded market, this positions you as the mature, trustworthy option.
Prevent the disputes that kill renewals.
Transparency failures poison relationships. When customers discover midstream that their data is being used differently than they understood, the vendor faces broken trust (even if not legal exposure). Upfront documentation creates shared understanding and sets clear expectations about data handling, training practices, and retention policies. When everything’s documented from day one, there’s less ambiguity to fight over later.
Why Buyers Must Demand Documentation
Contract professionals should treat AI documentation as a non-negotiable gating requirement, similar to security questionnaires or insurance certificates. Without standardization, assessment becomes a scattered collection of answers with no consistent baseline for evaluating whether a vendor can responsibly support your enterprise needs.
No disclosure, no deal. Vendors who can’t explain their own AI technology shouldn’t be allowed to sell it into your enterprise.
Requiring standardized AI disclosures delivers four concrete benefits:
Visibility
You can’t mitigate what you can’t see. Without knowing what models the vendor uses, where your data flows, how the model is deployed or whether third-party providers are involved, you’re contracting blind. Documentation illuminates these black boxes, giving you visibility to assess whether vendor practices align with your risk tolerance.
Consistency
When every vendor answers the same questions, you can compare apples to apples. One-off discovery calls create a patchwork of information that’s difficult to analyze, while standardized disclosures enable side-by-side vendor evaluation, quick gap identification, and targeted escalation of high-risk answers for deeper review. This approach is particularly helpful in crowded markets where multiple vendors offer similar solutions and you need clear criteria to make an informed choice.
Negotiation leverage
Procurement is about leverage, and documentation helps create it. Require vendors to complete disclosures before contract review begins, and you shift the burden of explanation onto them. If they refuse or provide evasive answers, that’s a signal that they’re either not enterprise-ready or hiding something. Both are negotiation signals you can use to demand stronger protections or walk away.
Stakeholder alignment
AI touches every corner of the organization. Security teams need to understand architecture and encryption. Privacy officers need clarity on data governance and training policies. Compliance teams must map features against HIPAA, GDPR or sector-specific obligations. Business units need to know what the tool actually does. By obtaining comprehensive documentation upfront, you give each stakeholder the inputs they need to weigh in before negotiations lock in terms. That alignment saves time and prevents last-minute deal derailments when someone discovers a hidden risk too late.
From Reactive to Strategic
When AI documentation comes first, procurement shifts from reactive scrambling to strategic facilitation. Instead of chasing down fragmented answers, contracts professionals become facilitators who streamline, not slow down, the deal.
To help both sides of the deal with the vendor onboarding process, I’ve created two practical resources:
Vendor AI One-Pager Template — guidance vendors can tailor to their AI products and features to demonstrate transparency and readiness.
Buyer AI Questionnaire Template — a non-exhaustive, starter questionnaire for buyers to facilitate procurement and contracting.
These should be considered living documents that you tailor to your organization’s products and needs and revisit often as the technology, and our understanding of it, evolves.
For more on AI and Contracts, check out my full column here.
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