What should we ask a roleplay vendor before buying?

Whether it ingests your proprietary content with weighted retrieval, what happens to your IP, whether the assessment rubric is yours, whether roleplay connects to goals and coaching history, whether it's mobile-first, and its compliance posture.

Seven questions, in the order that exposes the most:

1. Can it ingest our content, and how is it retrieved? "We have RAG" is not an answer. Ask whether retrieval is weighted toward your material, or whether the base model's generic advice competes with it.
2. What happens to our IP? Is our methodology used to train models for others? Does it stay exclusive to our instance?
3. Whose rubric scores the performance — ours or theirs? Generic scoring rewards generic behaviour.
4. Is the roleplay connected to anything? A module that doesn't talk to goals, coaching history and L&D tracks is a toy.
5. Where does it run? If it needs a laptop and a login, adoption dies. Mobile-first outranks every feature on the list.
6. Can we white-label it? For consultancies and large HR functions, the branding is the product.
7. Compliance. GDPR, PII filtering, SSO, data controls — before the pilot, not after.

Ask us these too. If any answer disappoints, that's useful information.

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