An enablement playbook for a large, risk-averse, vertically integrated company — mapping the internal estate, naming the systems you won’t crack first, and building the egress, identity, façade and audit layers that turn “nice demo” into “approved pilot.”
The easy version of "adopt an agent network" is a demo on a laptop. The hard version is the one that pays: getting that network approved, piloted and scaled inside a big, conservative company that has a lot to lose.
Picture the archetype. A vertically integrated manufacturer-retailer: its own factories, its own warehouses and trucks, its own stores, its own contact centre. The IT estate is mature but heavy — an ERP at the core, a patchwork of line-of-business systems around it, home-grown glue holding the seams together. There is a security function with veto power, a procurement function that owns the contract, and a culture whose first instinct is "prove this won't break sales during peak season."
This is a playbook for that company. Not the marketing pitch — the actual sequence of questions you get asked, in the order you get asked them, and the honest answer to each. I'll keep the vendor's claims, the things I verified in a build, and the things that are spec-only strictly separate, because in a room like this, blurring them is how you lose the room.
Continue reading “Enabling Blocks Network inside a conservative enterprise — the plumbing you have to build before an agent network is even allowed”
