1 – 14 May 2026 · Problem validation
Prep work is a bottleneck, not an annoyance.
Embedded sessions with an engineering firm and a law firm. Quote turnaround ran about a week; the first accurate responder usually won the job; years-old pricing was being reused, producing at least one zero-margin job. At the law firm, intake and conflict checks were consuming the most senior people. We recorded the win-rate claim as single-source at the time and flagged it for broader validation rather than treating it as settled.
22 May – 11 June 2026 · Technical feasibility
It invented specifications, confidently, and experts caught it.
On clean inputs the prototype produced coherent, cited, on-domain drafts. On messy real documents it fabricated specifics wherever grounding was weak — and did it fluently enough to look right. Domain experts caught the fabrications in drafts they had otherwise rated usable. That located the gating factor precisely: grounding, correct citations, and a human checkpoint. A larger model would produce more convincing fabrications, not fewer. The review step exists because of this week, and the three accuracy bars above were written down in the same cycle, before any scored result.
5 – 18 June 2026 · Deployment
The privacy objection became the reason to buy.
Privacy and data residency came up repeatedly as blockers to generic cloud AI. We demonstrated the agent running on-prem, on the customer's own confidential files, with no data leaving their boundary. Posture shifted from cautious to willing to proceed. The abstract promise had not moved them; watching it run on their own machines did.
12 – 20 June 2026 · Commitment
Money followed the demonstration, not the pitch.
A bounded pilot offer with an explicit ask converted to a paid engagement for an intake and conflict-check workflow, immediately after the private on-prem demonstration. We also recorded what did not happen: our original plan of ten cold conversations was the wrong instrument, and depth with a working demonstration beat breadth of outreach.