Wardley map · Diagram Design

AI assistant product · Wardley map

The value chain behind an AI assistant, from the user-facing need down to raw infrastructure, positioned against how evolved each component is. The one arrow is the map's point: agent orchestration is commoditising, so betting engineering time on a bespoke orchestrator is a shrinking advantage.

AI assistant product · Wardley map Wardley map plotting an AI assistant product's value chain from the user-facing need down to raw infrastructure against genesis-to-commodity evolution, with agent orchestration commoditising toward the product band. GENESIS CUSTOM-BUILT PRODUCT COMMODITY VISIBLE TO THE USER INVISIBLE Answer in the flow of work Chat UI Agent orchestration Eval harness Vector store LLM API GPU compute Object storage LEGEND Component Dependency Evolving

MOVEMENT

Agent orchestration

Still custom-built today, but the open-source orchestration frameworks maturing this year push it toward product. Betting differentiation here has a shrinking half-life.

Eval harness

Genesis-stage and specific to this product's failure modes. No off-the-shelf harness captures what "good" means for this assistant yet — worth the custom build.

GPU compute · Object storage

Fully commoditised. Buy, don't build — any engineering time spent here is time not spent on the parts of the chain that are still genesis or custom-built.

ai assistant product · wardley map example · diagram design