AI is evolving at a pace that many businesses struggle to keep up with, and leaders are feeling the pressure to adapt. From Agentic AI to multi-agent ecosystems, the changes are relentless. However, the smartest companies are not merely chasing the latest trends; they are asking insightful questions to ensure their AI vendors are prepared to navigate the uncertainties ahead.
Here are five crucial questions that every company should be asking their AI vendors right now.
Investing in Innovation That Matters
Innovation is more than just a buzzword; it represents a sustained commitment to research and development. Last year, giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google invested between 12% and 15% of their revenue into R&D, amounting to billions dedicated to future-ready capabilities such as AI agent orchestration and data infrastructure.
However, strong R&D alone does not guarantee relevance. Innovation must be driven by real-world buyer needs rather than mere technical ambition. Companies should seek vendors who co-develop with buyers, offer executive sponsorship, and provide a voice in their roadmap.
Ask your vendors: How does your annual R&D investment shape your 12-24 month AI roadmap? How has buyer feedback shaped your roadmap? How would we be involved in innovation cycles?
The best partners co-innovate to shape the market rather than chase it. Without a clear, ongoing commitment to buyer-centric innovation, vendors risk falling behind in an AI landscape that evolves every quarter.
Strategy for Multi-Agent Interoperability
We are approaching a fundamental shift in software operations. Imagine an AI-powered customer service agent seamlessly coordinating in real time with logistics, billing, and even third-party agents across different platforms. These multi-agent ecosystems represent the next natural evolution of the agentic era.
Open standards like A2A (Agent-to-Agent) and MCP (Model Context Protocol) are emerging to support this shift. These protocols enable agents to share context, communicate securely, and collaborate across platforms, similar to how APIs revolutionized cloud integration. They pave the way for framework-agnostic multi-agent systems, allowing AI applications to scale efficiently while maintaining flexibility and ease of integration.
Ask your vendors: Are your AI agents built for open, interoperable ecosystems – or locked into silos? How do your systems coordinate with external platforms and partners? Which interoperability frameworks or multi-agent ecosystems are you actively contributing to?
As AI becomes more autonomous and interconnected, the ability of your technology stack to work well with others will define its strategic value. Vendors who embrace openness and form community partnerships will position you to tap into broader innovation, reduce integration costs, and avoid vendor lock-in.
Ensuring Trust, Control, and Data Governance
As AI agents assume more autonomous decision-making roles, oversight becomes essential. Without visibility and clear governance, the risk of unintended consequences and non-compliance grows, especially as agents operate across organizational, platform, and regulatory boundaries.
Vendors must provide real-time observability into agent behavior and outcomes, alongside robust frameworks for responsible AI and ethical design. Grounding AI agents in trusted, real-time data is crucial to delivering accurate, relevant decisions. If agents act on outdated or biased data, risks compound.
With global regulation ramping up, from the EU AI Act to Australia’s Digital Platform rules, compliance must be proactive, not reactive.
Ask your vendors: How do you monitor, audit, and explain AI agent behavior? What frameworks guide your responsible AI and ethical design practices? How are you preparing for current and future AI regulations? Who owns the data used and generated by AI agents – and how is it used for training or decisioning?
The best vendors embed transparency and guardrails into both their architecture and culture, ensuring you can scale safely, adapt quickly, and remain in control as expectations and regulations evolve.
Supporting Organizational Readiness for AI
Many AI initiatives fail not because the technology falls short, but because organizations and the people who will use the tools are unprepared. Most companies lack the structures, processes, and cross-functional teams needed for AI-ready operations. Resistance and confusion often set in, especially when jobs feel threatened by AI.
The right vendor recognizes that transformation is as much cultural as it is technical. They coach leaders on how to reorganize for speed, guide middle managers on new workflows, and equip frontline staff to work with AI confidently and ethically, rather than just training a handful of prompt engineers.
Ask your vendors: What support do you offer for workforce upskilling across functions and levels? How do you help manage the cultural and ethical shift to Agentic AI? What DevOps and engineering practices do you enable to help us scale AI effectively?
For Boards, these are not merely operational concerns; they are strategic imperatives. Talent and retention equal competitive advantage, and the organizations that succeed will not just adopt Agentic AI; they will bring their people along with them.
Adapting to Market Changes
In today’s environment, the real risk is not moving too fast but locking into systems that cannot evolve. The last thing you want is to spend two years implementing a solution that becomes obsolete by the time it launches.
Vendors who offer adaptability as a core design principle will help you stay relevant, resilient, and ready for whatever comes next.
Ask your vendors: Do you provide industry-specific templates, low-code/no-code tools, or pre-built components to accelerate deployment? How easily can your platform adapt to shifting standards or emerging AI capabilities – can we reconfigure, scale, or pivot without rebuilding from scratch?
The smartest technology investments today are built around agility, modularity, and speed to value. This gives your teams the power to respond to market signals without waiting on lengthy development cycles or third-party dependencies, allowing you to change direction rapidly when needed.
The goal is not perfection on day one but measurable progress that compounds. Organizations that thrive in this AI era will treat every launch as a learning opportunity and every failure as fuel for iteration. Vendors who support this mindset will help you move faster, with less risk, and more resilience.
Closing Thoughts
Choosing the right technology partner today is not about perfectly predicting the future; it is about backing vendors who build for uncertainty and understand that agility, interoperability, and responsible innovation are the new non-negotiables.
As leaders, your role is not to know every technical detail but to ask the questions that reveal whether your partners are genuinely prepared for what is next, whatever that may be. In a world where change is constant and uncertainty is guaranteed, your questions, not your predictions, will determine your success. Because the future is not waiting, and neither should you.
Hannah Trimby is the Chief Customer Technology Advisor for ANZ Solutions at Salesforce.
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