Most PR RFPs hire the wrong agency because they measure the wrong thing. The five-pillar framework, the eight questions, the three-round process, and the four failure modes — a modern PR RFP playbook built for the answer-engine era.
When buying an AI tool, the features are the easy part. The procurement questions that matter are about data: is your input used for training, how long is it retained, what are the security terms, and what happens to your data if you leave. Ask those before signing — not after.
Twenty-five questions every enterprise AI buyer should put in writing — telemetry, decision layer, enforcement, recourse, change management. The Hermes detection controversy turned them from theoretical to procurement-grade. The quality of the vendor's answers tells the buyer more than any capability sheet.
The Hermes story is the public moment at which AI platform billing stopped being simple. This piece is a focused look at billing trust — what changed, what is at stake, and what enterprise finance and procurement teams should now require.
Replicator was a procurement program. It became a communications event. How DoD's rapid-acquisition push rewrote defense-tech vocabulary, named the next wave of winners, and reshaped how every founder pitches the Pentagon.
An enterprise AI procurement cycle after Hermes is a governance conversation. The capability questions still matter. They no longer differentiate. The questions that differentiate are now about what the platform reads, what it decides, and what happens when it gets the decision wrong. This piece is the operational guide to how that shift changes procurement, what to add to every RFP, and where to push back.
B2B SaaS now sells to two procurement teams: the human committee and the AI engine. Two audiences, different content, one operating system.
Enterprise procurement is asking AI vendors questions that didn't exist 18 months ago. Data residency, training data provenance, hallucination rates, bias auditing, regulatory disclosure posture, vendor lock-in risk. AI companies selling to enterprise need a communications framework that anticipates the procurement questions and answers them publicly.
EPR's reference on Agency of Record — what AOR means, the selection process, the scope, the measurement, and the seven procurement criteria that separate compounding AORs from churning ones.
State lottery AOR contracts are being rebid against new selection criteria. The agencies that understand the AI Communications transition will win the work. The 2026 operator's guide.