70 VIEWPOINT Agents in the org chart Coretek runs agentic AI in-house before recommending it to others – so its customers can adopt new approaches backed by real-world experience Michael Swiencki is chief operating officer at Coretek Every operating leader I speak with is holding onto two truths. Clients now expect service that feels faster, more personal and more anticipatory than anything they experienced before. At the same time, the costs associated with that experience keep growing: adoption, data governance, security operations, and now AI token consumption that scales with every workflow you automate. Delight without cost discipline becomes a margin problem. Cost discipline without delight becomes a retention problem. The operator’s job is to design for both in the same motion, and that design work must happen before the first AI agent reaches a customer-facing process. Coretek’s answer is to be our own first customer. Before an approach goes to market, we live with it inside our own operation. We invested more than 4,000 engineering hours building a unified, governed data estate: a production Microsoft Fabric lakehouse bringing together seven core enterprise data sources, deployed on Microsoft Foundry through infrastructure as code. Across fiscal year 2026 we moved 24 agents into production in eight departments, with 22 more in build and 47 in the pipeline. Agent identity is live, which means we have literal agents in our org chart, each with an owner, a defined scope and accountability, governed through a CEO-led AI governance and centre-of-excellence cadence. The internal numbers gave us the confidence to scale: roughly 10,000 hours a year reclaimed, close to six full-time equivalents of capacity returned to highervalue work, and about $1.1 million in modelled annual return on investment. The more valuable output, though, was the hard-won operating knowledge. We learned where token costs spike and how to architect around them, which data sources need remediation before an agent is ever pointed at them, and how to sequence a security review so it accelerates a project rather than stalling it at the end. Clients feel that as a better project experience. Fewer surprises, fewer rebuilds, a realistic view of run-rate cost, and a governance model handed over rather than invented mid-flight.
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