Outsourcing AI development can be a double-edged sword if you pick the wrong team. Many general software agencies claim they do AI, but all they really do is build basic wrappers around standard OpenAI APIs. For a core product feature, you want a specialized shop that can handle data engineering, fine-tuning open-source models, and optimizing infrastructure to keep latency and API costs low. Definitely screen candidates on their past enterprise deployments and their understanding of vector databases and data privacy compliance.