How to evaluate AI tools for your business without the hype

New AI tools launch every day, and nearly all of them promise to save you hours. Some do. The way to tell them apart isn't the demo: it's testing them on your own work with a few clear questions.

1. Start from a task, not a technology

Pick one task your team does often and finds tedious: summarising calls, drafting first versions of product descriptions, tagging support tickets. A specific task gives you something to measure. "Use AI more" doesn't.

2. Test on your own examples

Vendor examples are chosen to look good. Instead, collect ten real examples from your work, including a few messy ones, and run each tool on all of them. Judge the results the way you'd judge a new colleague:

• Is it correct? Check facts, numbers and names line by line.
• Is it usable as is, or does it need heavy editing?
• Is it consistent? Run the same input twice and compare.

A tool that's right eight times out of ten and obviously wrong the other two is often more useful than one that's subtly wrong every time.

3. Read the data terms

Before you paste in customer or company information, find answers to:

• Is your data used to train their models? Can you opt out?
• Where is it stored, and for how long?
• Who at the vendor can see it?
• Is there a business plan with stronger guarantees?

If the answers are hard to find, treat that as an answer.

4. Estimate cost at real usage

AI pricing is often based on usage: credits, tokens, minutes or "generations". A plan that's cheap in a trial can grow quickly once a whole team relies on it. Multiply the per-task cost by how often you'll really do the task, then add a buffer.

5. Check how it fits your workflow

The best AI tool is the one people actually use. Does it work where your team already works (email, docs, chat, your CRM) or does it mean copying text between tabs? Small friction adds up and kills adoption.

6. Keep a human in the loop

Decide up front which outputs need a person to check them before they reach a customer, a contract or a report. AI is good at first drafts and sorting; people are still better at judgement and accountability.

A simple scorecard

For each tool, score 1 to 5 on: accuracy on your examples, editing needed, data terms, cost at your volume, and workflow fit. Total it up and the right choice is usually clear.

Want to compare options? Browse AI & machine learning tools on ZoraHunt, or put two of them side by side.