How to vet chatbots and website assistants for real-world customer support, governance, and auditability AI customer service is now a procurement line item, not a research experiment. Organizations that decide to put a commercial chatbot in front of customers or staff discover quickly that the project is mainly an operations problem: who controls data, how the model behaves on sensitive queries, and whether the answers can be traced back if something goes wrong. High-profile deployments in regulated industries have shown that even large institutions can underestimate these operational details. The primary risk is not whether a model will be impressive.