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Agentic AI implementation roadmap

A sequenced plan for taking an agentic AI deployment from pilot to production-governed. Not a waterfall — each gate answers one question, and the gate answer determines whether the next stage starts.

Tool status. An HTML version of this roadmap circulated during the WordPress era. Republished here as a canonical page so revisions land in one place.

Gate 1 — One named workflow

Before any vendor contact. Pick a single workflow with a named owner and a documented failure mode. "Improve customer service" is not a workflow. "Route incoming tier-2 tickets to the right queue based on issue-type classification" is. If you can't name it in one sentence, go back.

Gate 2 — Evidence the pattern works somewhere

Published primary-source evidence (vendor case study with customer permission, analyst report, peer-reviewed paper) that the same workflow pattern has shipped elsewhere at a comparable scale. Not "AI can do X" — "X has been done, by a named org, using a named vendor, at N scale, for Y months." If you cannot find one, you are the reference case, which is a different risk profile.

Gate 3 — Non-human identity and data scope

The agent runs under its own identity, with explicit scope-limited access to only the data sources the workflow needs. This is the Task 3 of every procurement RFP. If the vendor's default deployment pattern is "use a human employee's credentials", fail the gate.

Gate 4 — Break-even on paper

Per-action economics work even at 2× the current vendor price, at realistic volume, with realistic substitution against a cheaper tier. If the case only works at list price and full adoption, it's fragile. See the GPT-5 Pro ROI calculator for the pricing-tier version of this gate.

Gate 5 — Governance charter names the runtime

The agent charter (not the general AI governance policy — the agent-specific charter) explicitly names: who approves changes, what the MTTD target is, what the kill-switch is, what the correction process is when the agent is wrong in production. Most charters predate the in-the-wild attack evidence of Q1 2026 — see AM-013 on the Q1 2026 enterprise reality check.

When each gate should open

  • Gate 1 before any vendor demo.
  • Gate 2 before any pilot commitment.
  • Gates 3–4 before any production data touches the agent.
  • Gate 5 before any external user or customer touches the agent.
Vigil · — reviewed