How we work with delivery partners

Large rollouts rarely happen with the platform vendor alone. A partner is usually in the room, and that is sensible: they know the customer's systems, their processes and their politics in a way we do not.

What matters is what the arrangement is optimising for.

The version that goes wrong

The partner builds the agents. They work. The knowledge of how they work sits with the partner, and when something needs changing the customer raises a ticket to modify their own system.

This can look like a successful programme for a long time. It is a dependency, and it is commercially comfortable for everyone except the organisation paying for it.

What we ask of a partner

That the customer ends up able to operate what was built. Specifically, that four things transfer rather than remaining with the partner:

• How to decide what to automate, which is usually narrower than the initial instinct.
• How to write evaluation criteria for the customer's own work, which is the skill that transfers furthest.
• How to instrument ownership and cost so the second agent does not repeat the first agent's mistakes.
• How to set a boundary and enforce it at the point of action rather than describing it.

A partner who delivers agents without transferring those has delivered output rather than capability.

What we provide

The platform, documentation, and direct access to our engineers during a rollout. We would rather answer a partner's question quickly than have them work around something.

We also insist on the same governance regardless of who builds: ownership per agent, attribution, policy enforcement, evals and audit. A partner cannot opt a customer out of those, because they are properties of the platform.

Where we will say no

Putting an agent in a decision path where being wrong is expensive and there is no review step. That is a design objection rather than a scope question, and we raise it with the partner and the customer together.

We also do not accept the arrangement where the partner is the permanent owner of the customer's agents. An agent needs a named owner inside the organisation that depends on it.

The measure

Whether the customer built the next one themselves. That makes a successful engagement one that ends, which is an awkward commercial position and the right one.

Next

The Agent Orchestration System pages cover the layers a rollout is built around. Partners and customers can reach us at contact@capconsultor.eu.