The agentic AI outsourcing playbook, from diagnosis to exit.

The Book is a practitioner’s operating playbook for two-party agentic service engagements. It runs on five gates, one measurement floor, and one commercial architecture, across three rails: the buyer, the vendor, and the joint seam between them. It operationalizes the standard frameworks rather than restating them — the US Interagency third-party lifecycle, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, EU AI Act Article 26, DORA, ISO 42001 and 44001, and the OWASP and CSA agentic-threat work — and it rests on the Report as its evidence base.

The regulators and standards bodies say what good governance requires. They do not say how two firms run agentic service delivery day to day, across the boundary, at machine speed. That is the layer the Book supplies — the operating discipline that sits between a control framework and a live engagement.

The book is written to the buyer’s chair first, because the study locates the largest workload there. Every instrument works from the vendor’s chair as well, and a vendor peer edition is planned. The one asymmetry is legal: the buyer holds a duty it cannot delegate, and where the two chairs genuinely diverge, that duty governs.

The framework is carried by named instruments, not by exhortation. The Customer Performance Maturity Index scores buyer readiness on evidence — as a gate, on inheritance of a live engagement, as a health check, and at exit. The vendor capability assessment is its long-missing companion, scoring the measured variables a conventional request for proposal never touches. The measurement floor is a set of co-signed metric definitions, buyer-held ground truth, and a signed evidence ledger that exists before any vendor report.

The Total Cost of Engagement captures whole-life economics, including the costs a conventional business case hides. The joint risk model carries seven risk categories across two registers that never merge: a shared, negotiable risk register, and a unilateral, non-delegable duty register. Two seam roles are defined at operating depth — the agentic-era engagement manager, the informational choke point, and the portfolio director, whose load is driven by autonomy and interfaces rather than headcount.

Each chapter’s full templates, work-session materials, instruction sets, and simple apps are hosted on Akholi.com as the Practitioner’s Toolkit, and versioned continuously. The Book states the method; the Toolkit is where the method is worked.