The Hermes detection controversy highlighted critical questions for enterprise AI buyers. This framework offers 25 questions across five categories—telemetry, decision layer, enforcement, recourse, and change management—to help buyers assess AI platform vendors and mitigate risks.
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.
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.