Evolve · Fourth stage of your AI journey
Enterprise agentic platform
Building your first agent is one problem. Running many of them, with their costs visible, their behaviour in check, their access secured and their quality measured, is a different one. In this engagement we design and build the shared foundations that let your teams spend their time on agents rather than plumbing.
One agent is a project. Many agents are an operation
Getting an agent to work for a few users is a solved problem for most teams. The difficulty starts when it works, and then there are five more, and then twenty, each built by a different team in a slightly different way. Things that were manageable by hand stop being manageable, and they tend to fail in the same few places.
What usually goes wrong is predictable:
- Nobody can see what the agents cost. Token usage grows with every conversation, and the bill arrives at the end of the month with no way to tell which use case, team or agent produced it.
- Nobody can tell whether they are working. Without monitoring, quality drifts quietly. An agent starts giving worse answers, or taking longer, or calling the wrong tool, and you find out when users stop trusting it.
- Changes break things quietly. A new feature or a new model version can make an agent less accurate, slower or more expensive, and without evaluations you cannot tell, let alone fix it.
The answer to all of these is the same: shared, reusable components that every agent plugs into, so that your teams spend their effort on the agents themselves.
Shared components, so your teams build agents and not plumbing
The enterprise agentic platform is one of our Evolve engagements. It is built for organisations that already have AI use cases in production and have started to ask the harder questions about running them at scale. It is individually scoped, because the platform has to fit your organisation: your policies, your requirements, your cloud and the systems you already run.
The platform is made up of four areas, and you choose which to build.
Observability and cost. You can see what every agent is doing, how well it is doing it and what it costs. That includes tracing individual conversations, tracking token usage against each use case and team, and alerting you before a budget is exceeded rather than after.
Guardrails. Your agents stay within their remit at scale, including what they retrieve from your documents and what they say and do with it. We set up guardrails once, as shared components, so that every agent starts with them and a rule can be changed in one place.
Agent security. Every agent has its own identity and only the access it needs. We design this as a pattern, with gateways between your agents and the models and tools they use, so that securing the tenth agent is a configuration rather than a project. We make it work with the identity systems and access policies you already have.
Evaluations. You can tell whether an agent is getting better or worse. We build evaluation sets and checks into your delivery process, so that a new feature or a new model version is measured against a baseline before it reaches users. Evaluations are only worth running if somebody acts on what they find, so we start from the decisions they need to support and the thresholds that trigger action.
Scoping first, then one component at a time
Shaping (before the work starts)
A working session to understand where you are: which agents are live or close to live, which cloud you run them on, which identity systems and policies apply, and who will run the platform. Together we decide which areas you need and how urgent each one is, and agree who takes part on both sides. This is where the order of the work is set, and it is the most important part of the engagement.
Phase one: Design
We design the platform as a whole before we build any of it. That covers the reference architecture, the components we will use in your cloud and how they connect, and which pieces are configured from what your cloud provider already offers and which need something custom. We look at the identity systems and access policies you already have, because that is where the platform meets the rest of your organisation. The phase ends with a design review with your platform team, security colleagues and the people who own your agents.
Phase two: Build and hand over, one component at a time
We build in the order agreed, one area at a time, inside your environment and alongside your engineers. Each component is proved end to end on a real agent before we move to the next, and then handed over to your platform team, with the runbooks they need to operate it. You do not wait for the whole platform to be finished before getting value from the first part.
We finish with the patterns that let a new agent start on the platform from day one, so your teams can keep adding agents without us.
Questions we get asked
How long does it take?
It depends on which areas you choose and how much has to be built, so we do not quote a standard length. The scope, the timeline and the price are set once we have worked through what you need and how urgent each area is.
Which clouds do you work with?
AWS, Azure and GCP, using the components your cloud provider already offers wherever they fit. The components are chosen and scoped at the beginning, based on your cloud and your requirements.
Do we need our own platform team?
Yes. Your engineers build alongside ours and take over each component as we finish it. That is how you end up with a platform your organisation understands and can extend.
What about the agents we already have?
We move at least one or two of them onto the platform to show that it works. After that, your teams can move the rest, and build new ones, using the patterns we leave behind.
How is this different from a Design & build sprint?
A Design & build sprint builds one agent, with the baseline security and testing it needs to go live. This engagement builds the shared components that let many agents run safely, at a sensible cost, with their quality measured. Agents built in sprints are a natural first set to move onto it.
How does it relate to Governance programme design?
Governance programme design decides which rules apply to your agents and which controls enforce them. This engagement builds the platform where those controls live. You can do either first.
Ready to run agents at scale?
If your agents work but each one has been built differently, and nobody can say what they cost or how they are behaving, that is a conversation worth having. Fill in the details and we’ll send you the full description of this engagement, including what deliverables you should expect from us. If that aligns with your goals, then we can schedule a first call to work out the details.
