ARX × Deloitte Consulting — Channel partner brief

To: [Principal name], Deloitte Consulting · AI & Data Practice / Deloitte AI Institute From: Mershard Frierson · Founder, ARX Date: May 2026 Length: 2 pages, 5-minute read

> *We're proposing a 90-day co-pilot engagement: Deloitte commits two principals + one technical SME and one named F500 prospect (non-audit-client of Deloitte — see appendix); 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 Deloitte AI&D 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 — Deloitte AI Institute is the loudest boardroom-thought-leadership voice in the market, and Deloitte's delivery practice is the largest of the four firms. The bottleneck isn't strategy. The bottleneck isn't delivery capacity. The bottleneck is that *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 it does not exist as something Deloitte currently sells. Deloitte is the firm best-positioned to deploy at scale once the substrate exists.

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 — "Deloitte will define a governance framework in workstream 3" — is a slide, not a system.
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. (For Deloitte, this risk lands harder than at the strategy firms — the customer's audit committee is talking to your audit colleagues if Deloitte holds the audit relationship.)
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 Deloitte's typical $40–150M AI-transformation 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 Deloitte's strategy or delivery work. It is the infrastructure layer beneath both. Today, the customer's procurement team has no third-party choice for cross-platform agent governance — Microsoft only governs Microsoft, AWS only governs AWS, Salesforce only governs Salesforce. The customer with a multi-platform agent estate has no single answer. ARX is that answer. Deloitte is the firm best-positioned to deploy ARX-anchored engagements at the largest scale because Deloitte already runs the largest enterprise-platform delivery practice in the market.

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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 (often a Deloitte AI Institute publication-quality deck, but still a 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 Deloitte 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 Deloitte'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 Deloitte is that an ARX-anchored engagement is a larger engagement, with longer-tail revenue, with outcome-tied upside that today's engagement model cannot capture. Deloitte's typical AI-transformation deal sits at the top of the F500 services band — Deloitte does the biggest deals, and the ARX-anchored shape extends them further.

| Engagement component | Today (Deloitte AI&D) | With ARX (anchored) | Δ | |---|---|---|---| | Initial strategy + design | $5–10M [¹] | $7–13M (richer outputs justify higher fees) [²] | +$2–3M | | Integration / deployment delivery | $20–50M (Deloitte retains; large delivery practice) [³] | $30–70M (larger scope, ARX as substrate, headroom moves to differentiated work) [⁴] | +$10–20M | | Outcome-tied success fees | $0 (no defensible measurement layer) | $10–25M / yr for 3 yrs (productivity tracked by ARX) [⁵] | +$30–75M over 3 yrs | | Post-deployment optimization retainer | $5–15M / yr (Deloitte Managed Services already does this) | $8–20M / yr (continuous optimization on ARX dashboards extends scope) [⁶] | +$9–15M / yr over 3 yrs | | ARX revenue-share on platform ARR | $0 | 20% of ARX ARR (typical $400K–$1.5M / yr per F500 account) [⁷] | +$1.2–4.5M over 3 yrs | | Total per F500 engagement, 3-year basis | $40–105M | $112–242M | +$72–137M [⁸] |

Three engagements per year through this channel = $216–411M of incremental Deloitte revenue over a 3-year window [⁹]. The infrastructure investment from Deloitte's side is two principals + one technical SME 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 Deloitte'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. Deloitte takes the services upside, the success fees, the ongoing retainer, and the rev-share. The structural alignment matters: ARX wins when Deloitte's engagements actually deploy and produce measurable outcomes. We are not competing for the customer's wallet. We are sized to make Deloitte's largest engagements deliverable, not to capture services revenue.

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

We're asking Deloitte to:

• Assign two named principals + one technical SME 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 (must be a non-audit client of Deloitte — see appendix on independence)
• 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 × Deloitte")
• 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. Deloitte 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. Deloitte AI Institute has been the loudest voice in the boardroom on AI workforce transformation for two years; Deloitte's delivery practice is the largest of the four firms. The combination — boardroom presence + at-scale delivery — is the natural fit for ARX channel scale-out.

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 Deloitte.

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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 Deloitte AI&D technical lead 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 Deloitte partners will ask, with the answer

"How does this work for accounts where Deloitte holds the external audit?" This is the most important question and we want to answer it first. SEC and AICPA independence rules prohibit Deloitte from delivering management advisory services to audit clients without specific exceptions. Our pilot prospect must be a non-audit client of Deloitte, and we have a named-firewall arrangement model for the broader channel that scopes ARX-anchored engagements to non-audit accounts only. Your independence office reviews our pilot scope before signature; we will pre-screen prospect candidates against your internal independence database before either side commits to the named pilot account. The economic model in section 4 assumes Deloitte's non-audit-client F500 universe, which is roughly 75% of the F500 by count — still a large enough TAM to justify the channel motion.

"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.

"What's the technical maturity? Can we put this in front of a CISO?" ARX has a working backend (~15K LOC FastAPI, 105 production connectors, real intercept layer, real audit, real compliance generator), is hosted on Aptible (SOC 2 Type II / HIPAA / ISO 27001 — fully inherited for infrastructure controls per docs/compliance/soc2-mapping.md), and is pursuing AIUC-1 Type II attestation for the platform layer with readiness assessment in progress and Type II target Q3 2026 (per docs/compliance/aiuc-1-readiness.md). SOC 2 control mapping for shared-responsibility controls is documented and live. The Engagement Canvas and Board View are live in-product surfaces. We are pre-Series-A — appropriate due-diligence applies — but the technical substrate is real, not slideware. We will sit through a CISO's technical review with Deloitte's SE in the room.

"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 Deloitte'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.