Launching Merlin Autonomous Sourcing: One Layer, Not Fifty Bots

Zycus found more than fifty AI agents running inside its own marketing division before governance went in. Nobody buys a shadow agent estate. Everybody is building one. That is not a tooling problem. It is Agent Debt.

An RFP bot in one team. A supplier lookup in another. A contract summarizer somewhere else. Each one does its task well. Together they duplicate work, share no context, answer to no owner, and leave nothing an auditor can reconstruct. Omid Ghamami named that cost, and he has spent two years documenting what it does to the teams that keep adding agents without adding governance.

In this on-demand session, Omid Ghamami makes the case against the agent estate, and Braden Robinson runs the alternative live. One vague business request, taken all the way to an award recommendation in a single session, on a brief nobody cleaned up first. No slideware tour. Half argument, half proof.

What you’ll see:

• The four failure modes of a shadow agent estate: ownership, access, entanglement and operational blindness.
• The first move is a count. The audit that surfaces every agent running in your name, who owns it, what data it touches, and what it spends.
• Category intelligence built before the event, not after. 36 months of spend, contract and should-cost analysis on a live IT services brief where spend had climbed 196% with zero competitive benchmarking.
• Supplier discovery with the gates on. D&B, AVL and ESG applied to the shortlist, with the reasoning and the source behind every score, not just the score.
• Four award scenarios, each with savings, rationale and sources, from a request that arrived as a single sentence.
• The governance moment. Exactly where the human approves and what gets logged. AI decides. Suite governs. Enterprise stays in control.
• Omid’s reaction, unscripted, to what he had just watched, and the one thing he told the audience to do on Monday morning.