Campus procurement interviews highlight hidden AI features, opaque terms and support capacity

Ask procurement, counsel, the CISO and the business sponsor where approval stalls and what evidence they need to proceed. Inventory an existing product's newly added AI feature as a bounded engagement before considering an enterprise rollout. The value hypothesis is clearer decisions and fewer surprise obligations, not guaranteed savings. Ask whether staff capacity, recurring inference charges and exit effort are funded. The interview findings justify questions about disclosure and smaller-campus constraints; they do not establish that any particular vendor is unsuitable or that a sale is available.

Turn the vendor questionnaire into an evidence map linking each claim to a configuration, contract term or reproducible test. Require a sandbox and representative non-sensitive inputs. Trace prompts, retrieved data, logs and outputs across service boundaries, including embedded assistants and agents. Test role separation and feature-disable behavior rather than accepting an architecture diagram as assurance. Proposed validation should produce an explicit list of verified, unverified and inapplicable controls plus an estimate of integration effort. Deployment choice should follow data and service requirements, not an assumption that cloud or local hosting is inherently adequate.

Make the purchasing lead accountable for contract checkpoints and name an IT service owner for ongoing operation. Coordinate security, privacy, accessibility and business-user reviews before onboarding. Create a release-change register, renewal calendar and tested exit procedure; train staff to route unreviewed features to the owner. Proposed acceptance requires documented owners for material obligations, an approved support budget and successful export or deletion testing within the agreed scope. Track review cycle time and exceptions to improve the process. Risks include review overload, hidden feature activation and unfunded support after initial purchase.