The Agent Production Gate
In five business days, I’ll tell your executive whether one named agent workflow is ready for production, what evidence backs that call, and what has to change before approval.
One workflow. One decision.
You’ve got an agent workflow that works in a demo. Somebody senior has to decide whether it touches real patients, real claims, or real revenue. And the honest answer inside the building is that nobody knows, because the evidence is scattered across a notebook, a Slack thread, and someone’s memory of a test run in March.
That decision keeps sliding. Sliding is itself a decision, and it’s the expensive one.
The Gate ends it. Three outcomes, and I’ll give you one of them.
The decision you get
Proceed
No decision-critical dimension is missing, the thresholds and the stop authority are explicit, and any partial evidence has a named owner and a bounded condition.
Proceed with conditions
The business case and the accountable owner are confirmed, but one or more critical dimensions are only partly evidenced. Every condition gets an owner, an artifact, a due date, and a verification step. The workflow stays in controlled release until they close.
Stop
No accountable owner, no material use case or deadline, prohibited data use or unestablishable provenance, no way to define or test an unacceptable outcome, or no enforceable human-review and rollback path on a high-consequence workflow.
I’ll also say Stop when the diagnostic is being hired to manufacture justification for a launch that’s already been decided. Worth knowing before you buy.
Is this you?
- You’re a healthcare data or software company, roughly 50 to 500 people.
- One specific workflow is named. Not “our AI strategy.”
- An executive owns the outcome.
- A production decision is expected inside 90 days.
- Failure, delay, or a wrong output has a real consequence.
- Your team has artifacts or operating evidence I can inspect.
- You can describe how a $5,000 diagnostic gets purchased.
- Enterprise-wide readiness scoring.
- General AI education.
- Vendor selection with no workflow attached.
- A hypothetical project with no owner and no deadline.
If one isn’t true, we should talk about something else instead, and I’ll say so on the call.
What five days looks like
The clock starts once payment, sponsor availability, and minimum artifact access are confirmed.
| Day | What I’m doing | What you’re doing | What comes out |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Confirm fit, scope, payment, access | Sponsor confirms one workflow | Signed scope and artifact request |
| 1 | Review intake and evidence | 60-minute owner interview | Decision context and evidence map |
| 2 | Inspect technical and operating evidence | 60-minute lead interview | Draft scorecard and open questions |
| 3 | Test claims against artifacts | Targeted follow-ups only | Gap ranking and draft decision |
| 4 | Write the decision and the 30-day actions | Nothing, unless a blocking fact remains | Decision memo |
| 5 | Executive decision session | 60 minutes | Final memo, scorecard, action plan |
Two interviews. That’s the whole ask on your team’s calendar.
What’s in, what isn’t
Saying this plainly up front is cheaper for both of us than discovering it in week two.
- Intake for one workflow
- Artifact request and evidence review
- Interviews with the executive owner and one technical, data, or operating lead
- An evidence-backed production scorecard
- The five highest-consequence gaps
- An ordered 30-day action plan
- An executive decision session
- A fixed-price follow-on proposal, but only when one is justified
- Enterprise-wide maturity scoring
- Legal or regulatory opinion
- Penetration testing or formal security certification
- Model development or production implementation
- Vendor procurement
- Unlimited stakeholder interviews
- Any guarantee of approval or business outcome
The scorecard runs six dimensions: value, data fitness, evaluation, ownership, controls, and operations. Every judgment gets marked Confirmed, Partial, or Missing, and every Confirmed cites the artifact or the observed behavior behind it. I don’t average those into a maturity score. A number would hide exactly the thing you’re paying me to find.
Five gaps, not forty. Gaps get ranked by consequence, not by how many documents are missing. You’re getting the five most likely to change the production call, and every action in the 30-day plan has to close one of them. Education and documentation work that doesn’t change the decision comes out.
Implementation does not hide inside the diagnostic. If several decision-critical gaps can close in ten days, that’s a separate fixed-scope engagement and I’ll quote it separately.
What you walk away with
A decision memo that opens with the call, in three to five sentences, naming the strongest evidence and the highest-consequence uncertainty. The six-dimension scorecard with every Confirmed claim cited. The five gaps with owners and the evidence needed to close each one. The ordered 30-day plan, with the future decision each action unlocks.
A section titled what I am not concluding: artifacts you didn’t supply, judgments outside my scope, and the assumptions your executive has to own personally. Every diagnostic has limits. Most reports bury them.
How the meeting runs
I state the call in the first two minutes. Then the three pieces of evidence carrying the most weight, then the five gaps, then we confirm or correct ownership and deadlines, then we agree on the next production decision.
I don’t spend the hour narrating rubric items. You’ll have read those.
Getting started
Book thirty minutes. I’ll ask what the agent does and for whom, who can approve or stop production, when that decision has to be made, what happens if the workflow is late or wrong, what you’ve already tried, and what evidence is missing or disputed.
If any of that is still fuzzy, I’ll tell you the Gate is the wrong purchase right now, and what to sort out first.
The Data Product Builder
What I’m building, what broke, and what I’d do differently. Healthcare data products, decision infrastructure, and the messy middle of building alone.
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