How do I avoid getting ripped off by an AI company?

You are right to be wary. The entry cost for calling yourself an AI agency is a domain name and a ChatGPT subscription, and plenty of people have paid exactly that and nothing more. There are whole courses online teaching people how to launch an "AI agency" in a weekend by reselling someone else's chatbot with a markup. So when every man and his dog suddenly does AI, your instinct that some of them are chancers is not cynicism. It is pattern recognition.

The good news: chancers are easy to expose, because they all fail the same four tests.

What separates a builder from a reseller?

Ask to see a named build. Not a demo, not a slide, not "we work with clients across many sectors". A real system, a named client, and what it does day to day. If they cannot point at one thing running in production with a business depending on it, you are not buying a build. You are funding their first one.

Ask for a price in writing. "Pricing is bespoke, let's jump on a call" is sometimes legitimate for genuinely custom work, but a real firm can still tell you the shape of it: what a typical project costs, what drives it up or down, what you pay monthly afterwards. If every pricing question routes to a sales call, the price is whatever they think you will pay.

Ask where your data goes. Which AI providers touch it, whether it trains anyone's models, where it is stored, and what happens when you leave. Anyone competent answers this in two minutes because they had to solve it to build anything. Blank looks here mean they have never handled real client data, or worse, never thought about it.

Walk away from guarantees. "Guaranteed 10x leads" or "guaranteed page one of ChatGPT" is the AI version of the SEO cold call. Nobody controls what a model says or what a market does. Honest firms tell you what they have done before and what they expect, and they put the expectation in the contract as scope, not as a promised outcome.

What does a fair deal actually look like?

A defined first piece of work with a fixed price. Something working in your business within weeks, not a strategy document. You own the accounts, the code and the data, so you can sack them without losing the system. And they tell you when not to build: half the AI projects I get asked to quote should not exist, and saying so is the cheapest credibility test there is. If a supplier has never once told you no, they are selling, not advising.

None of this requires you to understand AI. It requires the supplier to prove they do, in plain English, with evidence. The ones worth hiring find these questions easy. The ones who get cagey have just saved you a lot of money.

For the longer version, including the exact questions to ask on a first call and how to compare a build against a subscription, read our guide to choosing an AI agency or consultant in the UK.