How to Write an AI Brief That Gets Accurate Vendor Quotes

Why Vendor Quotes Vary by 300%

Send the same AI project brief to five vendors and you'll get five wildly different quotes. The reason isn't that vendors are dishonest - it's that vague briefs force them to make assumptions. Different assumptions lead to different scopes, which lead to different prices.

What a Good AI Project Brief Includes

Business Context

What problem are you solving? What does success look like in business terms? What's the current process and what's wrong with it?

Data Requirements

What data is available? Where does it live? What format is it in? How clean is it? What access restrictions apply?

Functional Requirements

What should the AI system do, step by step? What are the inputs and outputs? What decisions should it make vs. escalate to humans?

Non-Functional Requirements

Most companies forget these entirely:

• Explainability - can the AI explain its decisions?
• Bias thresholds - what levels of bias are acceptable?
• Drift monitoring - how will model degradation be detected?
• Latency - how fast must responses be?
• Scalability - how many users/requests must it handle?

Acceptance Criteria

The single most important section. Define what "working" looks like in measurable terms. If you can't write acceptance criteria, you're not ready to commission a vendor.

The "Acceptance Criteria Test"

If you can't define what success looks like before the project starts, you're not ready to go to market. This isn't a criticism - it's a signal that you need analysis first, not implementation.

That's where we come in. EfficiencyAI writes AI briefs that get accurate, comparable vendor quotes - because we define the requirements so clearly that vendors don't need to guess.