# Rachel Kowalski, Director of Procurement at Fortis Assembly — read of Vendor AI, May 16 2026

> 11 years in procurement and ops, currently running a 6-person sourcing team at a 180-person contract electronics manufacturer outside Cincinnati. Two kids in rec soccer. I do most of my reading on the 7:42 Amtrak.

## How I got here

I searched "supplier due diligence software SMB" because our current process is embarrassing. We literally have a Google Sheet called `vendor_master_FINAL_v4.xlsx` and nobody touches it. A colleague in my ops Slack pinged a thread about procurement tooling and this link showed up in the replies. I clicked it between stops.

## What I clicked first

"Stop spending two days to shortlist one vendor" landed. That is my exact problem, worded almost exactly how I complain about it. The before/after list is the first thing I read fully. "Build a comparison spreadsheet by hand from inconsistent PDF brochures" made me say yes out loud on a train full of strangers.

The live-result mockup showing Meridian Polymers with a credibility score, verified certs, and a per-unit price benchmark is the kind of specific that earns a second look. Most tools show a generic dashboard screenshot. This shows a real search query and a real-looking result.

## Where I paused

The disclosure section. Buried below the fold, after all the confident before/after framing, it says: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations."

I read that twice. I still am not sure what this page is selling me. Is this a tool I can log into on Monday, or is this someone selling me a PDF about how to build a tool? The pricing tiers list "Unlock the dossier" for $5 and "Adopt the build" for $99-$199, which sounds like buying a business plan, not subscribing to software.

The "64 Adoptability score" and "1 in 7 Meaningful-success odds" also appear on the page. Those are metrics about whether this idea will succeed as a startup, not about whether it will work for me as a buyer. That context collision is disorienting.

## What I distrusted

"Teams are cutting vendor research from two days to two hours." Which teams? Where? The page says no live customers yet, so this is a projection. That line is written in present tense as a fact and it is not a fact.

"Three operator-grade capabilities, no AI badge theater." I appreciate the instinct but "operator-grade" is doing the same job as "enterprise-ready" does in the tools I already distrust. It's a vibe claim, not a spec.

The certification verification claim is the one I most want to believe and most want proof for. "Checked against issuing body records" sounds like something a developer wrote in a roadmap doc. ISO 13485 issuing bodies don't have a single public API. FDA registration is accessible. ITAR and AS9100 accreditation bodies are inconsistent. I would need to know exactly which issuing bodies are connected before I trust a cert check in a compliance context.

## What would convince me

One real customer. Not a logo wall, not an anonymized quote. A named ops person at a named company saying "we used this for category X and the cert verification caught Y." Even a short Loom of an actual search running live against a real query I did not see scripted in advance.

Also: answer the basic question of whether this is a live product or a business plan for sale. If it is a live product, show me a login screen. If it is not, say so in the hero, not in line 4 of a disclosure section below the fold.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says certifications are verified against issuing body records. Which issuing bodies are you actually connected to right now, and which ones are on the roadmap? I do not want an abstraction, I want a list.

2. The "Teams are cutting vendor research from two days to two hours" claim is written like a result. Is that from a beta user, an internal test, or a projection? I am fine with projection, but I need to know which it is.

3. What am I actually buying for $5? Am I buying access to run a search, or am I buying a PDF that tells me how to build this tool myself?

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The problem framing is the most accurate I have seen for what my team actually does wrong. But I spent five minutes on this page and I still cannot tell whether the software exists or whether I am being sold a pitch deck for a software company I would have to build. That confusion is doing a lot of damage.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-16 14:32 UTC. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*