A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "Talking The AI Talk Without Walking The AI Walk," Kin Lane, November 9, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/11/09/talking-the-ai-talk-without-walking-the-ai-walk/
Marisol had a vendor demo on Thursday and a shortlist of three. She was a procurement analyst at a mid-sized freight company, and she opened the post only because a colleague had pasted its title into a chat with no comment.
She read the opening with some irritation. The author had counted AI words on the homepages of providers in a catalog, which seemed like a stunt. A word count tells you nothing about whether software works. She waited for the post to overreach, and it didn't. It said the count was deliberately dumb, that it did not judge whether a company means it, and that a low score is not a verdict on whether the software works. She was a little annoyed at being denied the argument.
The numbers held her attention. Out of roughly 19,000 providers with a homepage of their own, 113 said AI or its neighbors more than a hundred times on that one page. Twenty-eight of those 113 scored zero on Agent Readiness. One page had 601 AI words. She tried to picture reading 601 of anything and gave up.
What bothered her was the line about who the homepage is for. The post said the front door reads like it was written for the next round, not for the person who has to wire the thing into their stack. Marisol was that person, or at least she was the one who signed off for that person. Six of the seven companies in the first table had come into the catalog from a venture portfolio page. She wondered whether she was being unfair to the company she'd favored, which had a very confident homepage and a very warm sales rep. The post was not about her vendor, and she knew it. That made it harder to dismiss.
She did not fully agree with it. The twelve companies that cleared both thresholds looked like a small club, and she suspected plenty of decent vendors fall short of both numbers for boring reasons. Quiet is not the same as empty. But she kept returning to a sentence she could have written herself: "That claim is free to make."
Further down she found the part that stung. "A vendor with a loud front door and a thin foundation is asking you to fund the gap." She thought of the last integration her team had inherited, when an engineer spent three weeks reverse-engineering behavior that should have been written down. Nobody had budgeted for that. It had simply appeared in someone else's quarter.
She did not forward the post or announce a new policy. She opened the evaluation sheet she used for every vendor and added a short block under the security questions, copied from the post's list. Is there an OpenAPI or an MCP server? Can a team read the docs without a demo request? Are pricing, a status page and a changelog public? Does the AI story match anything an agent could call?
Then she emailed the sales rep for Thursday's vendor and asked, plainly, where she could find those four things before the call. She expected nothing dramatic. She just wanted the answers on the table before the demo, not after the contract.