How an engagement actually works
No open-ended discovery. No invoice before you’ve seen something work.
The short version: audit, fixed quote, a working demo every Friday, two weeks of shadow mode, staged go-live with a tested rollback — then AgentOps. You can stop at every stage, and you own everything at all of them.
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The six phases
- 01
Audit — week 1. Five days, fixed price. You get the Agent Opportunity Map: every candidate workflow, ranked by recoverable hours, with integration feasibility tested against your live systems and a build estimate for each. You can stop here. The document is yours either way.
- 02
Scope and fixed quote — week 2. You choose one workflow. We quote it fixed — not time and materials, not an estimate that grows. The audit fee is credited against it. If the scope changes mid-build because you want something different, we re-quote openly. What we won’t do is discover convenient extra costs.
- 03
Build — weeks 3 to 8. A working demo every Friday. Not a status report. Not a burndown chart. Something that runs. Senior engineers only. The person who scoped it builds it. Nobody hands you to a junior after the sales call.
- 04
Shadow mode — 2 weeks. The agent runs alongside your team, on live data, logging every action it would have taken without executing any of them. You compare its decisions against your team’s, see the disagreements, and tune the thresholds. Only then does it go live.
- 05
Go live — with a rollback. Staged rollout: overflow first, then a percentage of volume, then primary. A documented rollback path at every stage, tested before you need it.
- 06
AgentOps — ongoing. Monitoring, evaluation runs, model upgrades, integration repair, drift detection, workflow expansion. Optional, and we’ll say honestly that most clients need it. An unmaintained agent degrades quietly.
What you own throughout
- The cloud accounts everything runs in
- The data, at every stage
- The repository, the eval suite and the documentation
- The right to end the engagement and keep the system running
Frequently asked questions
What if the Friday demo isn’t good enough?
Say so on the Monday. That’s the point of the cadence — problems surface in week 3, not week 9.
Can we pause between phases?
Yes. Each phase is a decision point, not a funnel.
Who exactly will we work with?
Named senior engineers, introduced before you sign.
How long from first call to live agent?
Typically 8–12 weeks including the audit and shadow-mode validation. Simple voice deployments on supported platforms can be faster.
What happens if we want to bring it in-house later?
That’s a good outcome and the architecture supports it. We document for handover from day one and will train your team as part of the wind-down.