The Agentic Mesh in Practice: Anatomy of an Agent-Product - Unladen swallow - Olivier Wulveryck

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The Agentic Mesh in Practice: Anatomy of an Agent-Product

Olivier Wulveryck — 2026-05-31 — https://blog.owulveryck.info/2026/05/31/the-agentic-mesh-in-practice-anatomy-of-an-agent-product.html

I am a consultant, and I regularly build presentations with Google Slides. My communication team has created dozens of pre-formatted templates (slides designed to convince , not just to present). The problem: choosing the right slides to illustrate the right narrative takes time, and filling them in mechanically adds no value. I built a multi-agent system to automate that part and focus on what matters: the discourse and the appropriation.

This project (agentigslide ) is also a concrete application of the agentic mesh principles I described in the previous article. There, I laid out a conceptual framework: four pillars, a three-phase trajectory, convictions about what an agent-product should be. Here, I tell the story of how these principles materialized in real code, architecture decisions documented through 16 ADRs, and a tool that works in production.

Note. This article was co-written with an AI. I am the pilot: I state the intentions, the ideas, and I review the entire document. The actual writing (the pen) was done by a robot. My goal is to share these ideas to open a discussion, not to write a technical masterpiece that becomes a stylistic reference. This version is designed for humans; if you prefer a version suited for AI consumption, the markdown source is available.

Convince, not present

Every slide creation tool solves the wrong problem. Gamma, Beautiful.ai, Pitch: they generate visually correct slides. But they produce presentations , not conviction presentations . The difference is fundamental.

Convincing starts with a narrative . Slides are a complement to it, not a restatement. A consultant preparing a pitch doesn’t start from a slide generation tool, they start from their argument, the structure of their demonstration, the ideas they want to anchor in the listener’s mind. Slides are just the visual support for that reasoning.

In this context, my communication team produced a catalog of ~300 pre-formatted slides in Google Slides (slides designed by visual communication professionals, crafted to illustrate specific IT consulting concepts: conviction slides, framing slides, comparison slides, process slides). This catalog is a brand asset that encodes visual and rhetorical conventions built over years of expertise.

The consultant’s value lies in choosing the right slides from this catalog to illustrate the right concepts in their discourse, then filling them with their content. The choice is strategic, the filling is mechanical. I wanted to automate the mechanical to free up the strategic.

The consultant’s value lies in the choice and the appropriation, not in the mechanical filling.

In the vocabulary of the agentic mesh, this is Pillar 2: Domains . The agent I built belongs to the consulting domain: its intention is expressed in business vocabulary (structuring a pitch, choosing conviction slides), not in generic technical terms.

The strategic landscape: a Wardley map

Before writing any code, I mapped the landscape with a Wardley map to understand where value lies and what strategic moves are possible.

The value chain reads top to bottom: the consultant must convince a client . To do this, they produce a narrative that they externalize into a structured brief (a markdown file). This brief feeds the agentic orchestration which draws from the pre-formatted slide catalog via a semantic index , to produce a presentation through the Google Slides and Drive APIs .

What the map reveals

The catalog is the invisible moat. Positioned in the Custom phase, it is relational capital (non-copyable without the communication expertise that produced it). A competitor could reproduce the agentic architecture, deploy the same LLM models, but could not copy this catalog without copying the years of expertise that shaped it.

Timing is critical. Agentic orchestration is leaving the Genesis phase to enter Custom. Generic generation tools (Gamma, Beautiful.ai) are under Red Queen pressure: they must constantly evolve just to not fall behind. Their natural direction is to absorb agentic capabilities. The window to occupy the “conviction slides” niche is 12 to 18 months .

Human-in-the-loop is a strategic choice, not a limitation. The consultant reviews and appropriates the generated slides. It is the step that transforms a correct presentation into a convincing one. It is not a stopgap waiting for the AI to be “good enough”: the human who presents is responsible for what they present.

Non-intrusiveness as doctrine. The communication team continues using Google Slides without learning any new tool. The system automatically...