Pitch Your First Enterprise Agent Project Like a Pro

Without Needing to be a Techie

On Monday morning, I went to a meeting with a prospect who told us he wanted to replace the top of funnel sales activity for all his sales team with AI agents. Pretty wild idea for so early in the week. This wasn’t a small business either.

The driver?

“The CEO keeps asking me why we don’t have AI Agents in our business yet?”

What a surprise.

The CEO’s question reveals something deeper about how businesses approach AI and herein lies an inconvenient truth.

Companies are in business to make money. The profits go towards one thing – delivering shareholder value. That’s it. The board of directors have no other mandate really. When you boil it all down to its simplest essence, they just have to win.

And winning to one company isn’t what it is to another.

My best customer has me working on four use cases for agentic solutions that unlock latent capacity from teams so that they can have more time to do what they do best. This will scale the business to new heights, put more money in people’s pockets at appraisal time and increase the enterprise value of the business.

Others get caught up in cost-cutting promises and think AI can just rock up and slash headcount.

The fundamental difference in how people see the opportunity of AI is down to their individual level of awareness. It’s with this in mind that we need to be able to explain to them what good and bad ideas for agentic solutions look like.

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The Agentic Awareness Paradox

Social media continues to play its role in creating confusion about what an agent actually is. Last week I wrote about how the cute little patterns diagrams floating around LinkedIn had created a misunderstanding about agentics in the mind of one of the smartest people I know.

The reason for this?

Context.

What I realised a few months ago is this – what people think an agent is comes down to your context. What’s going on in your organisation today and how it’s setup.

We’re at a point in the evolution of agents where debating the technicalities of what’s automation versus what’s truly agentic largely falls on deaf ears.

Why?

Because what people really need is a frame of reference.

Most people (especially the higher-up’s who pay for everything but tend not to be from a technical background) need to be able to visualise what an agentic solution looks like when framed in their business context.

In many cases, they just want to know why it’s different to ChatGPT!

Without giving people a bearing point, some idea of the landscape and the landmarks on it, they cannot visualise the idea, understand the constraints and see the risks.

Here's what I learned: The executives who approve million-pound agent projects aren't more technically savvy than those who reject them. They're just better at visualising how the technology fits their business.

The challenge isn't explaining what agents do, it's translating agent architecture into language that gets executives to support projects with potential.

I discovered that successful agent pitches aren't about better technology, they're about better translation.

The difference isn't in the pitch deck, it's in having a framework that translates technical complexity into business outcomes that every stakeholder in the room can understand and evaluate.

That framework is the Enterprise Agent Reference Architecture (EARA), a navigation map for turning agent architecture discussions into approved budgets.

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The EARA Framework: From Confusion to Approval