What to look for
when choosing one.

Six things, and only one of them is about AI. Can they name the systems they have connected before, and show you. Do they price per connected system. Is someone accountable after handover. Do they say who they are wrong for. Do they hand over the credentials. And can they tell you what happens when a connected system changes underneath the build.

Not which tools they like. Which specific systems they have authenticated against, read from and written to, and on which project. Someone who has already wired your exact stack is doing configuration. Someone meeting it for the first time is doing integration. The second is fine and it costs more, but you should know which one you are buying.

Fields get renamed. API versions retire. Permission scopes narrow. A proposal that ends at delivery is selling a build that degrades on a schedule you do not control, and the failure is silent: it keeps producing output, the output just stops being true. Ask who notices, and when.

A vendor with no disqualification list has either not thought about it or will not tell you. The answer should be specific and it should cost them business. Ours is published.

Three things: the logic, the connections, and the credentials. If the accounts are in the vendor's name or the automations live in the vendor's workspace, you are renting the system and the switching cost is the whole build.

Everyone can demo something impressive. The signal is whether they ask how many systems are involved before quoting a number. A flat figure produced without that question has not been scoped, and the gap gets discovered in month two, by you.