Strategy — Moat & future-proofing
- Date: 2026-07-04
- Status: Accepted (direction)
- Relates:
positioning.md, ADR-0168 (packaging), ADR-0169 (engine),../design/guided-flow-onboarding-playbook.md, the../../CONTEXT.mdglossary.
North star (one line)
Section titled “North star (one line)”Each organization hires a domain professional — grounded only in that org’s own knowledge — who answers and gets things done across every touchpoint in the customer’s language, and hands off to real humans at the edge of its knowledge or authority. Never bluffing.
Multi-tenant and per-role: an org doesn’t hire one shared agent, it hires its own — isolated, scoped to its own KM — and can hire several (a rental concierge and an HR desk and a compliance desk), each bound to different touchpoints.
What this is, concretely
Section titled “What this is, concretely”| The concept | In Puccha | Where |
|---|---|---|
| “hire a professional” | a Persona (role + voice + judgment + tools), provisioned from a vertical Template | ADR-0167 |
| “the org’s own KM” | grounded only in Vertical knowledge (the org’s Sources) ∪ Horizontal knowledge (curated Packs), always cited | ADR-0168 §2 |
| “gets things done” | Guided flows — one engine; itinerary / cart / lead / reservation / DSAR are instances | ADR-0169 |
| “every touchpoint” | omnichannel; the agent emits structure, channel adapters render (widget / LINE / …) | ADR-0140/0133 |
| “hands off, never bluffs” | scope-gate + citations + anti-fabrication + human handoff | ADR-0147 |
The moat — honest
Section titled “The moat — honest”The concept is not itself defensible: grounded agents, personas, and omnichannel are table stakes (confirmed across a 21-competitor scan — Intercom, Sierra, Glean, Salesforce, plus Thai players Amity, Botnoi, Zwiz). What competitors can’t easily hit is the specifics:
- Thai regulated-industry depth — 0 of 21 ship curated PDPA/BOT/SEC/OIC knowledge. Western incumbents lead with ISO/SOC2; Thai SMEs lead with nothing.
- Compliance-first as the whole product — never-bluff, cited, audit-logged, hashed query logs, per-tenant retention. Incumbents bolt this on; for us it is the core promise.
- Curated regulatory Packs — a maintained PDPA/BOT/SEC/OIC knowledge layer, grounded and citable. The one thing the whole market leaves as “bring your own.”
- Local SI distribution — Certogo + named channel partners into regulated Thai enterprises.
The moat is focus + localization + trust posture + distribution — not a technical wall. Defensibility depends on executing that depth (real Packs, real SI relationships) faster than incumbents care to localize.
We do NOT build a custom/fine-tuned LLM
Section titled “We do NOT build a custom/fine-tuned LLM”A fine-tuned model bakes knowledge into weights → stale, uncitable, hallucination-prone — the opposite of the grounded, cited, never-bluff discipline that is the moat. For KM/compliance QA, grounding beats fine-tuning. “Deep-area expertise” comes from, in order of leverage:
- Curated domain Packs (the expertise, grounded + citable).
- Domain Personas (the professional’s training: voice, judgment, escalation).
- Retrieval + eval tuning — a domain reranker/embedding tune (small, cheap) + Promptfoo golden sets (ADR-0006) that prove quality (faithfulness ≥0.85, citation-recall ≥0.80).
- Model routing — Sonnet for hard reasoning, Haiku for routine; per-Persona.
Reserve model-level work for the reranker/embeddings. Consider a custom LLM only for a narrow, ultra-high-volume task where cost/latency dominates — never for knowledge depth.
Two markets, one engine
Section titled “Two markets, one engine”- External touchpoints — retail, tourism, sales: guided flows that convert (cart, itinerary, lead).
- Internal compliance KM — the sharpest wedge, matching the ICP buyer (compliance officer / DPO). Staff “hire an internal professional”: upload internal policies as Sources, subscribe to regulatory Packs, provision an internal (auth-required) Persona scoped by ACL (ADR-0003), that walks staff through e.g. a PDPA data-subject request with citations and hands off to the DPO for judgment. Internal use has the lowest hallucination tolerance and the clearest compliance buyer — where never-bluff is worth the most.
Future-proof scorecard
Section titled “Future-proof scorecard”Anti-fragile (survives foreseeable change without a rewrite):
- Grounding-first — facts live in the org’s KM, not model weights, so model progress is a tailwind: swap/route Haiku → Sonnet → next-gen freely, cheaper and smarter, never obsoleted. The single most load-bearing decision.
- One engine, many verticals — a new domain is data (Template + KM), not code.
- Channel-agnostic — a new touchpoint (a new app, voice) is an adapter, not a re-architecture.
- Compliance-first rides the regulation tailwind — rules only tighten; the product gets more valuable over time.
Execution risks (not architecture flaws):
- The moat is focus + distribution, not a patent → defend with speed + depth of Packs + SI lock-in.
- Agentic transactions (book/pay/provision) are deferred by design (the
httpTool/action framework is deferred, not blocked) → no rewrite needed, but unbuilt; buyers will eventually expect it.
Verdict: the direction is clear and the foundations are future-proof. Remaining risk is execution — build the guided-flow engine, ship real regulatory Packs, win the SI channel — not architecture.