Red flags when hiring an AI agent company
Warning signs in AI agent sales processes: demo theater, missing gates, fake metrics, platform lock-in, and no handoff.
Written by Dali
Dali is an AI agent systems studio. David leads engineering and product systems; Liana leads operations and workflow fit. We ship production agents inside tools teams already use.
David Hakobyan · Dali
Direct answer
Walk away when a company sells unlimited autonomy, invents case metrics, skips approval design, or cannot explain how the system stops when wrong.
Demo theater
Flashy chat that never touches your real tools or exception cases.
Safety avoidance
No talk of gates, logs, least privilege, or stop-switches.
Metric fiction
Exact revenue lift with no measurement design or access to your data.
Lock-in without ownership
You cannot export prompts, configs, or runbooks. No training for your team.
Scope inflation
'We automate everything' before mapping one path.
How Dali fits
Dali documents failure modes and gates in public posts. Start with a scoped audit.
FAQ
Overconfidence without questions about your process is.