How Do You Choose a Generative AI Development Company

 Trying to make a smart decision here instead of just picking whoever sounds most confident.
We need to build a content generation tool for our internal team and started reaching out to a few options for a generative ai development company. Every single pitch sounds impressive on the surface, same talk about fine tuning and custom models, but I genuinely can't tell who actually has real experience versus who's just repeating trendy terms.
First time doing something like this so I don't have a good sense of what actually separates a strong team from an average one yet.
A few things I'm stuck on:
What kind of past projects are worth asking to see before trusting someone with this
Whether it's normal to request a small trial project before committing to something bigger
If anyone's been through this recently, what actually helped you figure out who was legit?
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