ADR-0015 — The agent closes the sale, inside the limits of C6

Status: accepted · Date: 2026-10-02

Context

001 § Role made the agent "a front desk, not a salesperson": it answers grounded questions and hands off everything else. That was the right scope while the agent could only reply with text. Since 012 it can send the tenant's flows, tag a contact and set fields, and the sales sequence a tenant runs today is a fixed drip that sends the same content to every lead on a timer, whatever they said. The agent is the only component that reads what the lead said, and it is not allowed to act on it.

The reflexive option is to keep the front desk. Its case is strong: a front desk that only answers is hard to get wrong, and every step towards selling is a step towards the failure C6 exists to prevent: a confident claim that was never in the catalog. A model told to sell will reach for urgency, discounts and outcomes, because that is what sales copy in its training data does.

The middle option, a guided seller that qualifies and steers but leaves the ask to a human, was also considered. It was turned down because the human step it keeps is the one the contact waits longest for, and the ask itself (sending the payment link) has nothing in it that needs judgement the catalog cannot supply.

None of this was measured. There is no baseline conversion figure yet, and 023 § Success is measured twice requires one before rollout.

Decision

The agent takes a lead from first reply to the payment-link flow on its own, and every C6 limit on what it may claim stays exactly as it is.

Consequences

• The agent qualifies, chooses content, answers objections from the catalog and sends the payment link. 001 § Role is rewritten to say so in the pull request that implements 023.
• C6 is not relaxed. A price, date, payment option or promotion still comes from the catalog or not at all. Discounts not in the catalog still escalate as price_negotiation. "Invented urgency" stays on the 001 § Register never-list.
• Cost: more turns end in a confident answer instead of a handoff, so each wrong answer now reaches a contact rather than a person. The eval suite must carry sales cases (objections, "is that the best price?", pressure to commit) before the prompt ships.
• Cost: a human no longer sees a lead until payment or escalation. Context the human used to gather in conversation has to be written down by the agent (024 § Three free-text notes).
• Revisit if the eval suite shows the agent inventing a price, a promotion or a deadline on any sales case, or if paid enrolments fall after rollout while link-sent rate rises. The second means the agent is asking too early, and the guided-seller option is the fallback.