Demos are the vendor's best case; what you're buying is the Tuesday-afternoon case. This final post is the checklist for seeing it before you pay: five contract-level questions, the red flags, a fair pilot design — and, since I sell these systems, the scenario where the honest answer is don't buy from me.
You can't verify most AI sales claims without buying first. Speed to lead is the exception: how long a new lead waits for a real answer is a number, and you can measure yours this week with a stopwatch. I build these systems for a living, and this is the one part of my pitch you don't have to take on trust.
Vendors sell the term 'AI receptionist' on warmth. Here's the shift log instead: what one actually handles in a day for a clinic or a contractor, what a good handoff to a human looks like, and the four places where it breaks. I build these systems, so the failure modes come first.
I build AI sales systems for a living, so read my answer with the suspicion it deserves: no, AI will not replace salespeople. It's already replacing something else — the part of sales that was never selling. Knowing which part is which is worth real money if you run a business.
Everyone is selling context engineering as the new discipline. On my machine it's plumbing: four boring pipes that feed the agent, one drain that keeps junk out, and a valve that decides which pipe answers which question.
A static Astro site with 15KB of JavaScript was shipping 3.4MB of images. Here are the three failure modes that got past the image pipeline — the fallback-always-ships rule, the screenshot the optimizer never touched, and the boilerplate nobody referenced — and the 15 lines of Sharp that fixed all of it.