Building agentic systems
Agentic engineering is how a company leaves the dinosaur age. An agent is not a prompt — it is a bounded actor with tools, memory, policy, and a scoreboard. We engineer all five and wire them into the systems your business already runs on, at a size a mid-market company can actually fund.
- 7 wks
- Median first agent in production
- 98%+
- Eval pass gate before release
- 100%
- Runs with an immutable trace
- −61%
- Typical cost per task after tuning
The agent lifecycle we run
Every stage has an exit criterion. You never fund the next one on vibes.
- STAGE 01
Workflow forensics
Shadow the humans doing the job today and find the decision points worth automating.
exit: baseline metrics - STAGE 02
Eval harness first
A golden set from real cases, scored, before a single line of agent code.
exit: scored golden set - STAGE 03
Thin vertical slice
One path, real tools, real data, tightly bounded autonomy.
exit: passes eval gate - STAGE 04
Supervised rollout
Human approval on every action, shadow mode alongside the existing process.
exit: 2 wks clean - STAGE 05
Autonomy dial-up
Widen permissions per capability, backed by monitoring and instant revocation.
exit: SLOs held
Guardrails, by default
Autonomy is a dial, not a switch. Each capability an agent holds is granted explicitly, logged immutably, and revocable in one call.
Capability grants, not blanket access
Each tool is permissioned individually with its own limits and approval thresholds.
Deterministic escape hatches
Low confidence, unknown entities, or PII route to a human path — never to a guess.
Immutable traces
Every input, tool call, and output retained and replayable for audit and incident review.
Budget ceilings per run
Steps, spend, and wall-clock are hard-capped. Runaway loops fail closed.
Regression gates in CI
A prompt or model change that drops the golden-set score does not merge.
agent: refund-resolver
autonomy: supervised
tools:
- ledger.read // unrestricted
- ledger.refund // ≤ $250, human ≥ $250
- crm.note.write
escalate_on: [pii_detected, low_conf]
retention: 400d immutable traceWhere agents pay for themselves in month one
SUPPORT
Resolution agents
Handle the long tail of tier-1 tickets against real systems, escalating cleanly when policy says so.
OPERATIONS
Exception handling
Watch operational feeds, detect the break, propose the fix, and prepare the human approval.
FINANCE
Reconciliation
Match, explain, and document discrepancies across ledgers with a full evidence trail.
SALES
Pipeline agents
Qualify inbound, enrich records, and draft follow-ups grounded in your own CRM history.
ENGINEERING
Internal copilots
Agents grounded in your codebase, runbooks, and incident history — not the public internet.
COMPLIANCE
Document review
Extract obligations, flag deviations, and cite the clause behind every single call.
FAQ
Questions we get before the first sprint
What is an agentic system?
An agentic system is a bounded software actor that plans, calls typed tools, keeps state between runs, operates under an explicit policy, and is scored against a golden set. It is not a prompt and not a chatbot — the five engineered parts are what make it deployable in production.
How long does it take to get an agent into production?
Seven weeks is our median from kickoff to a supervised agent running in production. The first two weeks are workflow forensics and an eval harness; the agent itself is built against a scored golden set, then rolled out under human approval before autonomy is widened.
How do you stop an agent doing something it should not?
Autonomy is a dial, not a switch. Every capability is granted explicitly with its own value ceiling and approval threshold, low-confidence or PII cases route deterministically to a human, budgets for steps and spend are hard-capped so runaway loops fail closed, and every grant is revocable in one call.
Who owns the code and the infrastructure?
You do. Everything runs in your cloud account and lands in your repository from day one. Tekvo operates it for as long as you want us to, and every engagement ends with handover documentation your engineers can act on.