ARX × Boston Consulting Group — Channel partner brief

To: [Managing Director & Partner name], BCG · BCG X / BCG Platinion From: Mershard Frierson · Founder, ARX Date: May 2026 Length: 2 pages, 5-minute read

> *We're proposing a 90-day co-pilot engagement: BCG X commits two MDPs + one BCG Platinion principal engineer and one named F500 prospect; ARX commits a free pilot license, a dedicated solutions-engineering pair, and co-branded delivery surfaces. If the pilot lands the prospect as a paying customer, we move to a co-sell agreement with 20% rev share on closed deals plus joint go-to-market on the resulting reference. The artifact you'd take into the next boardroom is concrete, not slideware.*

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1. The boardroom problem you have today

Every F500 transformation engagement BCG X runs in 2026 ends in the same conversation. The customer's CEO asks: "what's our AI workforce plan, and when do we report measurable productivity to the board?" Your team has the strategy answer — and unlike strategy-only firms, BCG X already builds. BCG Platinion's engineers already write production code with the customer's team. The gap is not strategy. The gap is that today the build delivers a sophisticated prototype that the customer's IT team has to operationalize — *the deployable infrastructure that delivers 10,000 governed agents across the customer's actual platform mix, with audit-ready evidence the board can defend* — does not exist on the customer's side, and BCG X today has to build it from scratch every engagement.

Three risks sink the deal at procurement every time:

1. Governance. "Who's accountable when an agent does something it shouldn't?" The customer's CISO needs a real answer. Today's answer — "BCG Platinion will build the governance framework in workstream 3" — is a 12-month build, not a system on day one.
2. Audit defensibility. "Show me what our auditor sees." Without a tamper-evident, externally-verifiable audit chain, the customer's audit committee won't sign off, and the engagement stalls in legal review.
3. Kill switch. "If something goes wrong, how fast can we turn it off?" A scope-of-work line item that says "kill switch capability" doesn't pass the CISO's first question.

These are not strategy gaps. They are infrastructure gaps. They are why even BCG X's typical $20–60M build engagement spends 30%+ of the budget rebuilding governance / identity / audit primitives that should be off-the-shelf.

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2. What ARX is

A vendor-neutral control plane that issues per-agent cryptographic identities, enforces action-level policy in-process at every agent runtime, generates auditor-verifiable compliance evidence, and propagates kill switches across every system the agent has touched. Across the seven commercial agent platforms (Salesforce Agentforce, Microsoft Foundry, Google Gemini Enterprise, AWS Bedrock AgentCore, ServiceNow AI Agents, UiPath, IBM watsonx Orchestrate) and the four open frameworks (LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, OpenAI Agents SDK).

ARX is not a model vendor and is not a competitor to BCG X's build work. It is the infrastructure layer beneath it. Today, when BCG Platinion engineers walk into an F500 build engagement, they spend the first three months reinventing identity-issuance, policy-evaluation, audit-anchoring, and kill-switch primitives because there is no off-the-shelf substrate for cross-platform agent governance. ARX is that substrate. BCG X does the differentiated build above the substrate; ARX absorbs the undifferentiated build below it.

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3. The boardroom moment we want to enable

In your next F500 boardroom — say, [the engagement you're scoping with the [Customer] CFO this quarter] — the working session looks different.

Today: you walk in with a 60-slide deck, hypothetical productivity numbers, and a 24-month roadmap. The board asks two clarifying questions and tables the decision for the next quarter.

With ARX: you open the Engagement Canvas live in front of the customer's exec team, drag in their actual functions (Sales, Engineering, Customer Success, Finance, Operations) parameterized with their actual headcount and current systems, and the cost / productivity / connector-availability model recomputes in real time. You toggle conservative / balanced / aggressive scenarios with a single click. The customer's CFO can see, on screen, that 19,900 governed agents at the balanced scenario yield $1.92B in annualized recovery against $84M in platform + operating cost — sourced from the customer's own numbers, not from a BCG template.

You then click "Preview as board." The customer's CEO sees a projected board view of Q3 2027 — cost recovered, productivity gain, audit defensibility (78 of 113 SOC 2 controls hash-pinned to the actual ARX release), open risk register, plan-vs-actual against your modeled cohort deployments, peer benchmark against BCG X's portfolio of similar engagements (anonymized; firm-private benchmark IP).

The board sees a tangible artifact, not a slide. Your engagement closes that quarter, not next.

The Engagement Canvas and Board View are real and demonstrable today. We can show them on a Zoom in the next 14 days.

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4. The economic model

The structural reason this works for BCG X is that an ARX-anchored engagement is a larger engagement, with longer-tail revenue, with outcome-tied upside that today's build engagement model cannot capture. BCG X's typical deal-size band sits between McKinsey (strategy-heavy) and Accenture (SI-heavy) — engineering-substantive, but not at SI-scale.

| Engagement component | Today (BCG X build-led) | With ARX (anchored) | Δ | |---|---|---|---| | Initial strategy + design | $5–10M [¹] | $6–12M (richer outputs justify higher fees) [²] | +$1–2M | | Integration / deployment delivery | $10–25M (BCG Platinion retains; rebuilds primitives every time) [³] | $20–40M (BCG Platinion retains; primitives are off-the-shelf, headroom moves to differentiated work) [⁴] | +$10–15M | | Outcome-tied success fees | $0 (no defensible measurement layer) | $6–18M / yr for 3 yrs (productivity tracked by ARX) [⁵] | +$18–54M over 3 yrs | | Post-deployment optimization retainer | $1–3M / yr (limited; customer takes over) | $4–9M / yr (continuous optimization on ARX dashboards) [⁶] | +$9–18M over 3 yrs | | ARX revenue-share on platform ARR | $0 | 20% of ARX ARR (typical $250K–$1M / yr per F500 account) [⁷] | +$0.75–3M over 3 yrs | | Total per F500 engagement, 3-year basis | $18–41M | $66–132M | +$48–91M [⁸] |

Three engagements per year through this channel = $144–273M of incremental BCG X revenue over a 3-year window [⁹]. The infrastructure investment from BCG X's side is two MDPs + one BCG Platinion principal engineer for a 90-day pilot.

> *Footnotes [¹]–[⁹] — sourcing and confidence labels for each cell — are in partners/economic-model-assumptions.md. Every numeric range is open to revision based on BCG X's view of actual engagement economics; the sidecar exists to make our math transparent, not to argue with the partner who's run more of these engagements than we have.*

The ARX product takes a fixed share of platform ARR. BCG X takes the services upside, the success fees, the ongoing retainer, and the rev-share. The structural alignment matters: ARX wins when BCG X's engagements actually deploy and produce measurable outcomes. We are not competing for the customer's wallet. The headroom that ARX creates inside BCG Platinion's build budget is engineering time freed up to do differentiated work — orchestration, agent-task design, change management — instead of rebuilding identity / audit / policy substrate.

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5. The 90-day pilot — what we're asking, what we commit

We're asking BCG X to:

• Assign two named MDPs + one BCG Platinion principal engineer to the pilot (rough order of magnitude: 0.3 FTE total over 90 days)
• Engage one named F500 prospective customer where you have an active or imminent AI workforce conversation
• Co-deliver one boardroom-grade engagement using the Engagement Canvas + Board View
• Provide a written post-pilot evaluation we can use jointly to refine the channel motion

ARX commits:

• Free pilot license for the named customer for the 90-day window
• Dedicated solutions-engineering pair embedded with your delivery team
• Co-branded Engagement Canvas + Board View ("ARX × BCG X")
• Reference rights for joint case study + co-marketing if the pilot lands
• 20% revenue share on the customer's contracted ARX ARR if the pilot converts to a paying customer
• Mutual non-poach + standard IP terms (your IP stays yours; ARX IP stays ARX; the engagement-specific configuration is jointly owned)

Pilot success criteria (we agree on these in week 1, both signatures):

1. The customer's CFO or CHRO sees a live demo of the Engagement Canvas + Board View by day 30.
2. The customer signs a paid trial (≥$50K, ≥6 months) by day 90.
3. BCG X internally validates the channel economic model with one practice leader by day 90.

If we hit 2 of 3, we move to a co-sell agreement. If we hit 3 of 3, we move to a co-sell agreement with named-account exclusivity in your selected industry vertical for 12 months.

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6. Why this conversation, why now

The window is bounded. Microsoft Defender, AWS Identity Center, and Google Agent Space all have native cross-platform agent governance roadmaps with first-party announcements expected at Microsoft Ignite October 2026 and AWS re:Invent December 2026. The 12–18 month window before hyperscaler bundling closes is the window in which the consulting channel for cross-platform governance gets established. BCG X's positioning as the "build with the customer" practice (vs. McKinsey's strategy-only or Deloitte's at-scale-SI shapes) is the most natural fit for a substrate-plus-build motion — you already do the build; ARX just lets you skip three months of substrate-rebuilding per engagement.

There is one cross-platform vendor-neutral agent governance platform that is shippable today. ARX is it. We are sequencing one to two consulting-firm channel partners through 2026 to ensure delivery quality on the first engagements; we are in active conversation with a small set of firms and expect to sign the first by end of Q3 2026. We would prefer the first to be BCG X.

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7. Next step

A 30-minute working session inside the next 14 days, with the goal of agreeing whether the 90-day pilot proceeds and identifying the candidate customer.

I have time blocks Monday/Wednesday/Friday next week, US Eastern. [Calendly link / direct calendar invite to follow.] If you'd prefer to bring a BCG Platinion principal engineer to that conversation, we will bring our head of engineering to match. We can demonstrate the Engagement Canvas + Board View live; the artifact you'd take into [Customer]'s next board meeting will be on the screen.

Looking forward.

— Mershard

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Appendix — Four things BCG X partners will ask, with the answer

"How is this different from [hyperscaler]'s native governance?" Hyperscaler governance is platform-native (Microsoft governs Microsoft, AWS governs AWS, Google governs Google). The customer with a multi-platform agent estate — i.e., every F500 — has no single answer. ARX is vendor-neutral and built specifically for the cross-platform case. Hyperscalers will eventually compete on this, but they will not bundle each other's platforms; the cross-platform vendor-neutral position is structurally available only to a third party.

"BCG Platinion engineers will want to look at the code. What do we see when we do?" This is the right question for a build-led firm and we expect it. The technical substrate: 14,800 LOC FastAPI backend, in-process Cedar policy evaluator (AWS open-source), SPIRE-fork workload identity issuer, Merkle-anchored audit chain with RFC 3161 timestamping, 105 production connectors. Hosted on Aptible (SOC 2 Type II / HIPAA / ISO 27001 inherited per docs/compliance/soc2-mapping.md); pursuing AIUC-1 Type II for the platform layer with Q3 2026 target. Architecture documents and the threat model for the LLM router are in docs/security/threat-model-llm-router.md. We will sit in a sprint review with your principal engineers, walk through the code, and answer hard questions about the in-process PDP latency budget, the credential-broker hot path, and the kill-switch saga implementation. If your engineers say it's not engineered to BCG Platinion's bar, we want to know in week 1, not month 6.

"What's the IP arrangement for engagement-specific build above the substrate?" The standard split: ARX IP stays ARX (the platform, the connectors, the policy library, the audit chain). BCG X IP stays BCG (the engagement-specific orchestration code, the customer-specific policy bundles, the integration patterns). The engagement-specific configuration (which templates, which connectors, which manifests) is jointly owned and is a portable artifact the customer can take if either party leaves. We can structure this in the co-sell agreement; the BCG IP terms team can review the standard contract before pilot signature.

"What's the founder's commitment to the channel motion vs. direct sales?" The channel motion is the company strategy, not a side bet. We are not running a direct enterprise sales team in parallel that would compete with BCG X's account leads. Every ARX deal in 2026–2027 routes through a consulting-firm channel partner or a designated systems-integrator. This is a structural commitment in our hiring plan and our cap table — we will share the operating plan in the technical follow-up.