Definitive answer
Hire an AI agent consultant for the first one or two production agents to import the playbook — agent topology, eval discipline, MCP integration patterns, and AgentOps runbooks. Transition to internal engineering once you have a maturing AI platform team and a documented golden eval set. The expensive mistake is asking internal engineering to invent the playbook from scratch.
Time-to-first-production-agent, eval discipline, and the cost of avoidable mistakes — particularly around ACL propagation, tool sprawl, prompt versioning, and rollback.
Most successful programs pair an Implement Agentic engagement (3–6 months) with a 2–4 person internal AI platform team that takes ownership at the end of the program.
After the first production agent ships and the eval harness is in CI — typically 4–6 months from engagement start.
Reinventing eval and observability discipline, which silently extends the project by 6–12 months.
Implement Agentic ships closed-loop AI agents for Orange County and Southern California enterprises.
