Five questions, a sentence each #
You do not need to understand the technology to buy this well. You need to know where you would stand if the relationship ended badly, and that is decided by five things.
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Whose name is on the accounts?
A good answer: yours, with us invited in as a user we can remove. A poor one tells you they intend to be the gatekeeper, whether or not they have thought about it that way.
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Who owns what you build for us?
A good answer: you do, in writing, and here is the clause. A poor one tells you nobody has raised it before, which means the default applies and the default is not you.
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Where does our data go?
A good answer: a named list of who processes it and where. A poor one tells you they cannot say, so neither can you tell anyone who asks.
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What happens on the day we leave?
A good answer: you keep the accounts, you get an export, here is what stops working. A poor one tells you the exit has never been designed, which is how lock in happens quietly.
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Who fixes it when it breaks?
A good answer: a named arrangement with a cost attached. A poor one tells you the proposal is incomplete, because things it depends on will change.
Ownership is three separate things #
People ask about ownership as one question and get a reassuring answer about one third of it. Split it up.
- The accounts. Every subscription, every connected service, every login. If these were bought in the supplier's name, then leaving means rebuilding rather than removing a user.
- The thing that was built. Whatever was made specifically for you. Under UK law the default for commissioned work is not what most people assume, which is why this one has its own page in who owns what gets built.
- The data. Your records, your correspondence, and anything the system accumulated while it ran. Ownership of data is less clean a concept than people expect, so the practical question is whether you can get a complete copy out in a usable form, whenever you want, without asking permission.
The data questions, in the order that matters #
UK GDPR requires a written contract whenever a supplier processes personal data on your behalf, and the ICO publishes the list of terms it has to contain. You do not have to memorise that list. You do need to know whether one exists for your arrangement, which is covered in what a data processing agreement is for.
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Who else touches it?
Almost every supplier uses others underneath them. Ask for the list, and ask whether you are told when it changes.
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Does any of it leave the UK?
Sending personal data abroad is its own subject with its own rules. The ICO’s material on international transfers covers when a transfer is restricted, when a country has adequacy, and the contractual routes that exist otherwise. The answer you want from a supplier is a specific one, not a reassurance.
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Is any of our content used to improve a model?
That is a second thing happening to your data, not a footnote to the first, and it deserves a direct answer.
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What happens to it when we stop?
Deletion or return at the end of the contract is one of the terms the ICO says a processor contract has to cover, and it is the one businesses discover they needed after they have left.
Security, without pretending to be an auditor #
A business cannot meaningfully audit a supplier's security, and should not pretend to. What it can do is ask for the things that are checkable.
Cyber Essentials is the most useful of those. Certification is a baseline signal rather than a guarantee, and plenty of competent one person suppliers do not hold it. Absence of it is a reason to ask more, not a reason to walk away.
What Cyber Essentials actually certifies
The NCSC describes it as the minimum standard of cyber security recommended by government, built on five technical controls, delivered through IASME as its official partner. The higher level, Cyber Essentials Plus, adds independent technical testing that those controls work in practice rather than on paper.
The questions about what happens later #
Most disappointment with this kind of work is not about the build. It is about month nine, when something the automation depends on changes and nobody agreed whose job that is. Ask directly what the arrangement is for keeping it working, and what it costs. A proposal with a build price and no running arrangement is an incomplete proposal, which is the point made in full in how much AI automation costs.
Ask, too, what the supplier expects to change underneath the work. Anyone who has built this kind of thing for more than a year has watched a product alter its behaviour without warning, and can say so plainly.
One question that sorts people quickly #
Ask what they would tell you not to automate.
A supplier who has looked at your business has an answer, and it is usually specific: the job that only happens four times a year, the process nobody can describe the same way twice, the decision that turns out to be judgement wearing a checklist.
A supplier with no answer is selling capability rather than solving anything. The patterns are set out in when not to automate something, and the test that separates the two is in which jobs are worth automating.
What to do with the answers #
Write them down and send them back in an email that starts with "just so I have understood". That single habit converts a conversation into a record, gives the supplier a chance to correct anything you misheard, and makes the terms visible to whoever reads it next.
If you want to see what these answers look like written out by a business rather than promised on a call, ours are on our privacy notice, which names the processors we use, what each one does and how long we keep things. What happens on a first conversation with us, before anything is agreed, is set out in what a free audit involves.