An SLA is the section of the contract where the vendor commits, in numbers, to the things the customer will hold them accountable for. In CX-AI the relevant SLAs are uptime (the service is reachable), latency (responses are fast enough), and operational quality (handoffs complete, audit rows land, errors are bounded).
The diligence question is not whether the vendor has an SLA, every vendor does, but whether the SLA is meaningful. A 99.9% uptime promise sounds good until you read the exclusions (planned maintenance, third-party outages, force majeure) and realize the effective coverage is much weaker. A latency SLA without percentile breakdowns lets the vendor average away their worst hours.
The other half of an SLA is the remedy. A service credit of 5% of the monthly fee is symbolic. A credit that scales with the severity, and an exit ramp for sustained breaches, is what gives the SLA teeth.
Vorel publishes uptime, voice-turn p95 latency, and handoff completion as contract SLAs. Breaches credit automatically against the next invoice, no support ticket required.