# Sunil Kumar > Sunil Kumar is the co-founder and CEO of Ailoitte Technologies, an AI-native engineering and product studio in Bengaluru, India (US entity in Dover, Delaware) that he has built since 2017 to 70+ engineers, 300+ shipped products and 50M+ end users, with ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certification. His thesis, "Agentic in Production", is that most enterprise agentic AI dies between the demo and production, and his work is getting it across that gap. This site is written in the first person by Sunil Kumar. Everything is free to read and licensed CC BY 4.0. Cite as "Sunil Kumar, sunilkumar.ai". Every content page also has a Markdown version at the same URL with a .md extension (for example https://sunilkumar.ai/writing/.md), and https://sunilkumar.ai/llms-full.txt holds the full text of the ideas, playbooks and essays. ## Ideas (named frameworks, each defined in one sentence) - [Agentic in Production](https://sunilkumar.ai/ideas/agentic-in-production/): Agentic in Production is the practice of running AI agents on real enterprise work, every day, with bounded failures, an audit trail, a named owner and a budget. - [AI-DLC](https://sunilkumar.ai/ideas/ai-dlc/): AI-DLC (AI Development Lifecycle) is a software lifecycle in which agents do a large share of the writing, testing and operating, and humans own the definition of done, the review of intent, and the decision to release. - [AI Velocity Pods](https://sunilkumar.ai/ideas/ai-velocity-pods/): An AI Velocity Pod is a small senior team that takes an agentic AI outcome from definition to production for a fixed price, owning the evaluation set, the refusal list and the runbook as deliverables. ## Playbooks (evergreen reference guides, versioned and reviewed) - [SDLC vs AI-DLC: why technology leaders are switching](https://sunilkumar.ai/playbooks/sdlc-vs-ai-dlc/): A working guide to AI-DLC for CTOs and VPs of Engineering - what changes at each stage, what it returns, what goes wrong, and how to explain it to your board. - [Agentic AI reference architecture for enterprise](https://sunilkumar.ai/playbooks/agentic-ai-reference-architecture-for-enterprise/): A six-layer reference architecture for enterprise AI agents - work definition, orchestration, tools, memory, guardrails, operations - with steps and checklists. - [How to evaluate an agentic AI vendor](https://sunilkumar.ai/playbooks/how-to-evaluate-an-agentic-ai-vendor/): Seven steps to evaluate an agentic AI vendor before you sign - refusals, evaluation set, traces, cost per run, compliance, ownership, pilot. With a checklist. ## Essays - [MCP vs API: why the third AI agent costs more than the first](https://sunilkumar.ai/writing/mcp-vs-api/): MCP vs API in plain English for department heads and CXOs. One remote per device against one USB-C port, and the sum that decides what your agents cost. - [Forward deployed engineers are a symptom, not a cure](https://sunilkumar.ai/writing/forward-deployed-engineers-are-a-symptom/): Gartner's guide to forward deployed engineering says the quiet part - vendors embed engineers because their platforms cannot ship alone. What to demand instead. - [What 306 agents in production taught me about enterprise AI](https://sunilkumar.ai/writing/what-306-agents-in-production-taught-me-about-enterprise-ai/): Leverge runs 306 agents across 13 functions. Where they cluster, why the process is the unit rather than the agent, and the rule that makes enterprises say yes. - [Fixed price for agentic AI: how pods make it possible](https://sunilkumar.ai/writing/fixed-price-for-agentic-ai-how-pods-make-it-possible/): Fixed-price agentic AI works when "done" is an evaluation set, a refusal list and a budget. Why hourly billing fails for agents and how pods price the work. - [What "production-grade" actually means for an AI agent](https://sunilkumar.ai/writing/what-production-grade-actually-means-for-an-ai-agent/): Production-grade is a checklist, not a feeling. Five tests an enterprise AI agent must pass, on refusals, traces, ownership, budget and evaluation. - [Why most enterprise AI agents never leave the demo](https://sunilkumar.ai/writing/why-most-enterprise-ai-agents-never-leave-the-demo/): Enterprise AI agents fail between demo and production for organisational reasons, not model reasons. The three gaps they die in, and what closes each one. ## Field notes (short lessons from real builds) - [The pull request nobody could review](https://sunilkumar.ai/notes/the-pull-request-nobody-could-review/): An agent's 3,100-line pull request passed every test and was approved in 25 minutes. It had quietly changed how money rounds. Why AI-DLC caps the unit of work. - [Ten thousand runs a day changes the price](https://sunilkumar.ai/notes/ten-thousand-runs-a-day-changes-the-price/): An agent that cost cents per run in the pilot cost far more per month at scale. Routing, caching and a budget ceiling fixed it; the ceiling mattered most. - [The agent that could not say no](https://sunilkumar.ai/notes/the-agent-that-could-not-say-no/): A support agent with no refusal path agreed to everything. The fix took an afternoon; the decision to write the refusal list should have been made on day one. - [The evaluation set that measured the wrong thing](https://sunilkumar.ai/notes/the-evaluation-set-that-measured-the-wrong-thing/): A document agent scored 94 percent on its evaluation set and failed in production. The set had been written by the team that built the agent. ## About - [About Sunil Kumar](https://sunilkumar.ai/about/): Who Sunil Kumar is, what he believes about agentic AI in the enterprise, and how Ailoitte Technologies came to be. - [Now](https://sunilkumar.ai/now/): what Sunil is focused on this quarter. - [Speaking](https://sunilkumar.ai/speaking/): talks, podcasts, media, and a downloadable bio kit. - [Work with me](https://sunilkumar.ai/work-with-me/): speaking, advisory, or building with Ailoitte's AI Velocity Pods. - [Topics](https://sunilkumar.ai/topics/): everything by pillar and tag. ## Optional - [RSS feed](https://sunilkumar.ai/rss.xml) - [Ailoitte Technologies](https://ailoitte.com): the company. - [rightagent.ai](https://rightagent.ai): Sunil's content brand and newsletter on the same subject.