The market is crowded at the top and thin on evidence: sell the record the client keeps

The large consultancies each have an agent platform, the model vendors sell through partners and their own engineers, and boutiques sell fixed-price pilots; what the people in between lack is not another platform but evidence they can inspect. Gartner expects over 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027, citing escalating costs, unclear value and inadequate risk controls, and warns of agent washing. The position for a small seller is evidence first: every engagement leaves a vault the client keeps, with the work, the history and a ledger of what each agent did and was allowed to do. The demonstration is the sales process, and the demonstration is checkable.

Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).

Note. The demonstration: a talk built and run by a governed agent hive in about a day, 28 workers, 57 vault commits, no plaintext in anything the server stored, every vault deleted at the end; the runs were not gated by a compiled behaviour policy, which was shown separately. Dinis proposes 'agentics' as the word for what is sold: the practice, not one workflow.

Where it comes from

Agentics, ready to sell Where the gap is; What we showed (newsroom)

What it answers in the 2018 book

Be a founder answered written, Life Patterns
Facts answered outline, Concepts

Where it goes

Chapter Sell, part Start the company (drafting); topic Be a founder (or a one-person service).

Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Send an agent, not a spreadsheet: due diligence derived from the code, not composed by the vendor, A startup should double down on understandability: less code, the same tools, and it can be checked and pass, Selling a service: each step small enough to say yes to, and each ends with something they keep, A service only scales with people: a curated marketplace of consultants, joined by proof of work, The reason to move is never sovereignty or cost: sell value that lands the day they switch, Answer the hard questions in full, publish what is live and what is design, and check your own site against the answers, Do not sell the need; answer a question somebody already has to answer, with a deadline.

Node idea:evidence-first-is-the-position in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.