Why most “top AI companies” lists are useless
Search for “top ai companies in india” and you'll get a dozen listicles ranked by SEO, not by results. The right way to choose an AI partner isn't to scan a list — it's to evaluate against the three things that determine whether your project ships.
The three things that actually matter
- Have they shipped production AI in your industry or an adjacent one? Ask for references where the system is running today, not where it was demoed last year.
- Do they own the system post-launch? AI degrades. Whoever ships needs to be willing to monitor, retrain, and roll back. If they hand over and disappear, you've bought a depreciating asset.
- Are they honest about what's hard? The good AI teams say “your data quality will be the bottleneck.” The bad ones say “we can do anything.”
How to test a vendor in 30 minutes
Show them a real problem you have. Ask them to walk through how they'd approach it — what data they'd need, what could go wrong, what they'd do differently from a textbook. If the answer is generic, move on.