Engagement Tiers: Crawl, Walk, Run
Not every client needs a full agentic platform on day one — and pushing one on them before they're ready is how you lose the deal. These three tiers are sellable default bundles, not hard boundaries.
The Three Tiers, at a Glance
| Crawl | Walk | Run |
|---|
| What it is | An AI answer layered onto the client's existing search or site | A full conversational assistant as the primary experience | A fully agentic platform wired into the client's business systems |
| Surface | Knowledge Box or Modal Dialog | Full Bot, multi-panel | Bot + Search Results Page + APIs, as needed |
| Answer source | RAG only — ingested content | RAG + basic OOTB integrations | Full ReAct — RAG, custom integrations, commerce, CRM |
| Client IT lift | Minimal — a script tag and a URL | Moderate — content ingestion, branding, forms | Higher — integration credentials, workflow design |
| Typical timeline to launch | Days | 1–2 weeks | 3–6+ weeks, often phased |
| Best first pitch for | A client who's never deployed anything like this and wants to see fast proof | A client replacing or significantly upgrading existing site search/support | A client with clear CRM, commerce, or ticketing systems this needs to plug into |
Why This Isn't One Straight Ladder
It's tempting to treat Crawl → Walk → Run as a single line where each tier strictly contains the last. It isn't, and treating it that way leads to under- or over-scoping a deal. Two things are true at once:
- A Crawl-tier client can still want a Directive — a simple "navigate to this page" or "show this form" action doesn't require a custom integration, and it works from a Modal Dialog just as well as a full Bot. Surface complexity and integration complexity are two different decisions a client makes, not one.
- Vibe Coding, multilingual support, and multimodal input are available at every tier — they're delivery mechanisms, not tier-gated features.
Use the tiers to scope a sellable default bundle fast. Use the capability matrix below when a client's actual needs don't fit the default cleanly — which happens often enough that it's worth checking every time, not just for edge cases.
The Capability Matrix
✅ Included by default at this tier · ➕ Available as an add-on · — Not typical at this tier
Deployment Surface
| Capability | Crawl | Walk | Run |
|---|
| Knowledge Box (AI answer above existing search results) | ✅ | ➕ | ➕ |
| Modal Dialog (popup AI search) | ➕ | ✅ | ➕ |
| Search Results Page + facet search | — | ➕ | ✅ |
| Full Bot (multi-panel conversational assistant) | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| REST/WebSocket APIs for custom applications | — | ➕ | ✅ |
Knowledge Foundation
| Capability | Crawl | Walk | Run |
|---|
| Auto-create agent from a URL | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Scheduled web scraping | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Event-driven CMS/DXP connectors | ➕ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Image AI (auto-described, answer-matched images) | ➕ | ✅ | ✅ |
Guided Experience
| Capability | Crawl | Walk | Run |
|---|
| Multi-panel welcome screens | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| Simple Directives (navigate, show panel/form) | ➕ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Landing Page Experience Controls (pre-chat personalization) | — | ➕ | ✅ |
| Vibe Coding | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Integrations & Actions
| Capability | Crawl | Walk | Run |
|---|
| OOTB integrations (weather, maps, stock, email, SMS) | — | ✅ | ✅ |
| Forms engine | ➕ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Geolocation / store locator | — | ➕ | ✅ |
| Custom integrations (webhook, JSON REST, GraphQL, MCP) | — | — | ✅ |
| Commerce Assistant (Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce) | — | — | ✅ |
Service Operations
| Capability | Crawl | Walk | Run |
|---|
| Salesforce/Zendesk Knowledge as an answer source | ➕ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Live Agent Escalation | — | ➕ | ✅ |
| Case creation (Salesforce/Zendesk) | — | ➕ | ✅ |
| Activepieces support-email automation | — | — | ✅ |
Governance
| Capability | Crawl | Walk | Run |
|---|
| Filtered Content Responses (security layer) | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Content Filter Reporting | ➕ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Controlled / compliance-first answer mode | ➕ | ➕ | ✅ |
| Test Plans (scheduled QA validation) | ➕ | ✅ | ✅ |
The Graduation Path
Frame every Crawl-tier engagement as the start of a relationship, not a finished project: "this proves the value fast — once it's live, the natural next step is replacing your search box entirely, and after that, connecting it to the systems your team already uses." A client who says yes to a Knowledge Box today is a warmer conversation for a full Bot in three months than a cold prospect would ever be. See The Agency Service Model for how to structure this as recurring, expanding revenue rather than a series of unrelated projects.