Two lenses on what underlies the framework. The six pillars are how we build. The capability spine (ten domains, D1-D10) is what we assess. Together they say what a company needs, and how we hold ourselves to it, at every tier.
The operating principles of an AI-native company. Not aspirational, diagnosable, tier by tier. A company at L5 isn't discovering these. It runs them at organization-scale rigor because the tiers before it put them in place.
Scale through parallelism. Atomic, composable, idempotent tools. Full trace visibility. Async-first. Source of truth in one place. "The architecture is the asset."
Code is the universal interface of an agentic system: the only output that is simultaneously deterministic, scoreable, testable, versionable, and replayable. Reduce all problems to code. Prompts versioned like code.
Text, structured data, images, voice, code: all first-class inputs to retrieval and reasoning. The L1 substrate stops being "the warehouse" and becomes the multimodal source of truth the agents draw from.
Edge gating, not human-in-the-loop. Implement alongside, not on top. Shadow runs, migrate on evidence. "Evals are not QA. They are the heartbeat."
Don't over-scale infrastructure. Parallelize the agents. "Add an agent, not a server." Per-agent budgets. Cost attribution at L4. Cost-per-task replaces cost-per-seat as the metric.
Compacted retrieval over raw injection. Reduce institutional knowledge to code (runbooks, decisions, policies) and let the agents read it. The L1 source of truth becomes the L5 colleague's long-term memory.
A company doesn't "need agents." It needs some subset of ten domains, in the right order, at the right rigor. Every tool we evaluate fills one or more. The single biggest correction to the earlier framework: orchestration (D6) is a progression across tiers, not a category you buy once.
One trusted version of the truth?
Can we see, secure, and control who touches data and agents?
Which models, accessed how, swappable how easily?
Where do humans get leverage before anything runs autonomously?
How does the system ground answers in enterprise data?
Who orchestrates the work, and how autonomously?
What does long-running, failure-tolerant agent work run on?
Can we score it, trace it, and gate deploys on it?
Will it survive a security review and adversarial input?
Can BOD prove the outcome and own the loop?
Read across a row to see a domain's life cycle; read down a column to see what a level demands at once. The L3 column is the inflection.
The L3 column is the inflection: six domains turn core at once. That is why L3 is where the work, and the cost, compound.
A tool that covers many domains reduces integration surface, which is why the hyperscaler platforms anchor L3+. Single-domain specialists are best-of-breed and slot in alongside.
| Tool / platform | Domains covered | Primary level home |
|---|---|---|
| Databricks (Mosaic AI, Unity Catalog, Agent Bricks, Workflows, Vector Search, Gateway) | D1, D2, D3, D5, D6, D7, D8, D9 | L3-L5 · broadest single-platform coverage |
| Snowflake (Cortex, Horizon, Cortex Agents, Tasks) | D1, D2, D3, D5, D6, D7, D9 | L1-L4 (analytics-first) |
| AWS (Bedrock, AgentCore, Step Functions, Guardrails, SageMaker) | D3, D6, D7, D9 (+D1 via Redshift) | L3-L4 (AWS-anchored) |
| Claude (Anthropic) | D3, D4 (Claude Code), D6 (Agent SDK) | L2-L5 |
| LangGraph + LangSmith | D6, D7, D8 | L4 |
| LlamaIndex | D5, D6 | L3 |
| Braintrust · Langfuse | D8 | L2-L5 (eval loop · OSS traces) |
| Temporal | D6, D7 (durable exec) | L3-L5 |
| Lakera | D9 | L3+ |
| Edge Scale (BOD) | D10 + wraps D2, D6, D8 | L3-L5 · the BOD layer, across platforms |
Edge Scale is the only layer that spans governance + orchestration + outcome capture across platforms. It is a control-plane product-in-build, with capabilities phasing through 2026.
D10, the control plane, is the one layer that rides above every level: governance, cost attribution, and outcome capture that survive a vendor relicense or a hyperscaler land grab. Databricks wins inside its own estate; BOD wins across estates.
The Pillars are how we build. The Spine is what we assess. The 16 principles are the L5 rigor bar (atomic, idempotent, eval-gated, least-privilege). Use the maturity ladder to place the company; use the spine to say which domains are core versus absent. Never call a retrieval layer "a level."
Two domains are never skippable: a governed, integrated data foundation (D1) and governance and identity (D2). Deploy AI on ungoverned data and you automate the error, faster. The spine tells you what must be present; the level tells you the autonomy target.
Anything we can't inspect at the step level; no production observability beyond raw logs; hosted-only with no data-residency control; no SOC 2 Type II or a named path to it. These rule a tool out of client production.
Edge Assessment reads your foundation against the spine, one read per domain. Read-only access, credentials deleted at engagement close. You get a tier classification, a 90-day plan, and the durability flags the fund needs to see.
