The practitioner's checklist for evaluating any AI tool
Five questions that separate tools worth your time from demos with pricing pages — the same filter behind every Skillra recommendation.
Every Skillra review runs the same gauntlet. Here it is, so you can run it yourself on the tools we haven’t covered yet.
1. Does it survive contact with your real work? Demos are choreography. Feed it your actual messy input — your invoices, your codebase, your customer emails — inside the trial window. A tool that needs perfect input is a tool you’ll abandon by March.
2. What happens when it’s wrong? Every AI tool is sometimes wrong. The question is whether it fails loudly (flags uncertainty, shows sources, leaves a log) or silently (confident nonsense straight into your spreadsheet). Silent failure is disqualifying for business use.
3. Can you leave? Where does your data live, can you export it, and what breaks the day you cancel? The answer tells you whether you’re buying a tool or feeding a hostage situation.
4. What’s the real price at your volume? Per-seat, per-task, per-credit — model it at success, not at trial. Plenty of tools are cheap until they work.
5. Who maintains the relationship? Someone on your team has to own each tool — updates, prompts, quality drift. A tool nobody owns becomes shelfware with a renewal date.
Run the five, and most of the market disqualifies itself before you spend a dollar. The survivors are the ones you’ll find in our Recommendations.
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