Commercial & Exit Question Pack

What it de-risks

• ▸Make switching costs and data portability explicit while you still have leverage.
• ▸Test pricing for what happens at scale, not just the pilot line item.
• ▸Nail down IP ownership over inputs, outputs, and fine-tuned artifacts.
• ▸Assess vendor financial durability before you depend on it.

What is inside

4 corpus modules, at both RFI and RFP depth, in canonical order. Every question ships with what a strong answer looks like, the red flags to watch for, a response-format hint, and a default weight you can tune.

• Migration & exit
• Risk, insurance & financial stability
• Commercial & pricing
• Legal, contracting & IP

Sample questions

• List every category of customer data, configuration, and customer-generated artifact (e.g., prompts, fine-tuned model weights or adapters, embeddings, evaluation datasets, logs, audit trails) that a customer can export at any time during the contract.

  Why it matters — Buyers need to know upfront what is portable and what is locked in. Vendors often allow export of source data but not of derived artifacts that carry significant customer investment, creating lock-in.

• State the per-occurrence and aggregate limits of your current cyber-liability insurance policy, and identify the underwriter.

  Why it matters — Cyber-liability limits cap the vendor's ability to make the customer whole after a breach, data loss, or AI-mediated security incident. Underwriter identity signals the credibility of the coverage and whether reinsurance is likely to pay out under stress.

• Provide a URL to your public pricing page. If specific enterprise pricing applies, or if pricing is not public, attach your standard rate card.

  Why it matters — Transparent, published pricing reduces procurement cycle time and demonstrates commercial confidence. For fair shortlisting and TCO modeling, buyers need a written rate reference and cannot rely solely on sales-gated quotes, which create information asymmetry and downstream renewal leverage problems.

• Describe how your standard agreement allocates ownership of customer-provided input data, including any licenses you require to that data and the scope and duration of those licenses.

  Why it matters — Customer input data (prompts, documents, embeddings) is often the buyer's confidential or copyrighted material. Vendor licenses that are broader than necessary, perpetual, or sublicensable create unacceptable IP and confidentiality exposure. This question surfaces the baseline allocation before negotiation.