# 25 Questions to Ask an AI Developer Before Starting a Project

Use this checklist before hiring an AI developer, AI studio or AI contractor.

| # | Question | Current answer | Score 0-3 | Evidence | Owner | Next action |
| --- | --- | --- | ---: | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | What business decision or task should the AI system improve? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 2 | Who will use the result every week? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 3 | What would count as a failed implementation? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 4 | What is the smallest useful release? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 5 | Which documents, CRM records, messages, files or APIs are needed? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 6 | Who is allowed to access this data? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 7 | How often does the data change? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 8 | What data must never be sent to a model or third-party API? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 9 | Should the model answer, classify, draft, search, route or trigger actions? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 10 | Does the workflow need RAG, fine-tuning, rules, n8n or ordinary code? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 11 | What examples will be used to test output quality? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 12 | What should happen when confidence is low? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 13 | Which systems must read data from the AI layer? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 14 | Which systems can the AI layer write to? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 15 | Are webhooks, CRM fields, spreadsheets, queues or APIs already documented? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 16 | What latency, rate limits or uptime constraints matter? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 17 | Which decisions require human approval? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 18 | Who reviews drafts, exceptions and edge cases? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 19 | What should be logged for audit and debugging? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 20 | What are the main privacy, security and compliance risks? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 21 | How will prompt injection, bad source data or hallucination be handled? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 22 | What rollback or manual process exists if AI fails? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 23 | What artifacts will be delivered besides the demo? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 24 | Who owns maintenance after launch? |  |  |  |  |  |
| 25 | What should be audited before expanding scope? |  |  |  |  |  |