Let’s talk about the newest member of your team — the one that arrives with a rate card, a badge, and somebody else’s manager.
On Tuesday, IBM and Microsoft announced a platform called Imagine Enterprise. Read the press release and it sounds like software. More than six thousand prebuilt AI agents and assets from IBM Consulting. Microsoft’s Foundry, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, Fabric, Entra, Purview, Defender and Azure underneath it. Financial services, insurance and retail first.
It’s a good release. It’s also not the interesting part.
The interesting part is one phrase in IBM’s own blog post about the launch. They describe it as a digital talent agency for the enterprise.
Not a tool library. An agency. You don’t buy it. You staff it.
And that word choice isn’t marketing slop. It’s accurate. Look at how the thing is actually sold. IBM Consulting deploys and operates it on your behalf, or you co-innovate with them, or you manage it yourself. Forward-deployed engineers from both companies come in on qualifying engagements. The pitch is not “here is a product, go use it.” The pitch is “here is a workforce, and we’ll place it in your building.”
Also worth noticing what the release doesn’t contain. No price. No general availability date. And the one named customer, SEI, is described as exploring and looking to advance its transformation. Not running it in production. Exploring.
That is a positioning move, not a shipped product. Somebody decided to own the category name before the category has a reference customer.
Now. Picture the person on the other end of this.
She runs operations for a mid-sized insurer. She has been through three transformations. The ERP. Then the robots. Now the agents. Each time, the same thing happened. Her team knew how the work actually ran — the exceptions, the workarounds, the two clients who always need a phone call. And each time, that knowledge left her floor. It went into a deck, then a configuration, then a training session for people who would never sit where she sits.
This time it’s tidier. This time there’s a Context Studio. Somebody interviews her team for two weeks, and the process gets written down properly, in a system she doesn’t have a login for. The reconciliation runs itself. It works. And the exception queue now has no author. The woman who used to know why the exception was an exception retired in March, and her replacement has never seen the messy version.
That’s the thing about this shift. It doesn’t feel like a loss while it’s happening. It feels like relief.
So here’s the pattern, and it’s bigger than one announcement.
For twenty years, enterprise software sold the opposite promise. The software was the point, and the consultants were the tax you paid to get it installed. Every CFO in the world bought software partly to stop buying people.
This launch reverses that. The people are the product again, and the software is the delivery vehicle. Forward-deployed engineers are not a support perk. They’re the business model. It’s the Palantir play, applied to a bank’s back office, with an agent library bolted on so the hours look like technology.
And that matters because labour lock-in behaves differently to software lock-in.
Software you can replace. You hate the vendor, you run a migration, it takes two bad quarters and a lot of money, and then you’re free.
A roster is harder. The knowledge of how your process runs now sits in three places: your vendor’s engineers’ heads, your vendor’s agent definitions, and your vendor’s permission graph. To leave, you don’t cancel a licence. You unpick an org chart.
And the identity part is the quiet killer. Those agents get provisioned inside Entra and governed by Purview. Which means the thing that decides what your agents can touch lives in the same place that decides what your people can touch. So the day you decide to fire the vendor, you’re not revoking a subscription. You’re revoking access paths your own staff are standing on.
That’s not a conspiracy. That’s just what happens when a company with a services P&L builds a platform. If your revenue is hours, you build the thing that needs hours. Nobody in that building is being cynical. They’re being rational, and rationality compounds in one direction.
Now the part most people will miss, because the six thousand number is designed to make them stop reading.
Six thousand prebuilt agents is not six thousand gifts. It’s six thousand templates. Every engagement that adapts one of those agents for a client produces the next version of the template. Your messy process, cleaned up, generalised, and ready for the next insurer in your market.
Your operational edge becomes their product feature within eighteen months. That’s what scale means in a services business. It’s not a betrayal. It’s arithmetic.
And the thing they’re actually selling you isn’t the agent. It’s Process Studio and Context Studio — the place where your institutional knowledge gets typed into a format someone else owns. The agents are the visible layer. The written process is the asset. Whoever holds the written process holds the business, because a process nobody can describe is a process nobody can take away from you.
So what do you do, as the operator on the buying side?
First, before you take the demo, ask for the process document. Not the architecture diagram. The document that says what the work is, what the exceptions are, and who decides when the exception is unclear. If they’ll build it and you can’t read it, you’ve just paid someone to take the map.
Second, insist the process lives in your repo. Plain language. Versioned. With the tests — the ten cases that prove the agent still behaves. If it only exists in their studio, you don’t have a process. You have a tenancy.
Third, know who holds the identity. Agents should get their own narrow credentials, not a copy of a human’s badge, and those credentials should be issued and revoked by your team, on your clock.
Fourth, price the exit before you sign. Thirty days, full export of agent definitions, prompts, eval sets and logs, in a format a human can read, plus a run-book. Put a number on it. If the number is embarrassing, that’s the real price of the deal.
Fifth, keep one person who can rebuild it without them. Pay that person like they’re the insurance policy, because they are.
And the measurement that actually tells you the truth: switch one agent off for a week and see what your team can still do.
Here’s the principle underneath all of it.
A business that cannot describe its own process without a vendor has already sold it.
Not in a dramatic way. No single moment where the keys changed hands. Just a series of sensible decisions, each one slightly cheaper than the alternative, until one day the way your company works is documented somewhere you can’t log into, by people who bill you monthly to remember it.
The machine didn’t take your business. It got hired to run it.
Before you take the next meeting, ask for the process document. If they won’t hand you one you can read, you already know who owns it.