New AI tools launch every week, and most of them look impressive in a demo. This checklist helps you look past the marketing and decide whether a tool will actually fit your work.
Start with the job, not the tool
Write down the specific task you want to speed up, how often you do it and what a good result looks like. A tool that is excellent at video editing is useless if your bottleneck is drafting proposals.
The 12-point checklist
- Does it solve a task you do at least weekly?
- Can you test it on your own real data during the trial?
- How accurate is the output on your hardest example?
- Does it cite sources or show its working?
- What happens to your data — is it used for training?
- Is there a clear privacy policy and data-deletion option?
- Does pricing scale with seats, usage or both?
- Are the features you need locked behind a higher tier?
- Does it integrate with the tools you already use?
- Can you export your data if you leave?
- How responsive is support during the trial?
- Is the company still shipping updates regularly?
Red flags to watch for
- No free trial or a trial that only works on sample data
- Vague answers about where your data is stored
- Pricing that only appears after a sales call
- A changelog that has not been updated in months
Score each tool out of 12 and compare. The winner is rarely the flashiest one — it is the one that quietly saves you time every week.