Who is buying, building and running your product in 2028, and are you ready for it?
Increasingly, a machine. The shortlist is already being made before you know the deal exists, and the requirement is the same whoever the machine works for.
Point of view
The claim
The decision that matters was never the RFP. Not everyone gets the RFP, and the ones that go out are written around a product somebody already chose. The real decision happens earlier: in desk research, in a shortlist nobody records, through reputation and who came to mind.
Vendors never measured that stage because it was invisible, and it was called relationships. That stage is now being done by a machine. Today it's a person asking a model. Tomorrow it's a buyer's agent. It doesn't matter which, because the requirement is the same either way: your product has to be findable, buildable with, and operable without anyone from your side in the room.
If it isn't, you're not on the list, and nothing in your pipeline report will ever tell you.
The picture
Who does each job, 2026 and 2028.
Every row is a job your customer needs done before they'll buy. A person still signs. Every 2028 cell that says agent is a job that person will hand to a machine, and your product and your business have to be ready for it.
| The job | 2026 | 2028 |
|---|---|---|
| Find and shortlist | Buyer's engineer, a chat model, the stand at the show, a referral | Buyer's agent makes the first pass; a person reviews a shortlist already made |
| Quote and terms | Vendor rep, reseller, RFP | Components: agent to agent. Systems: the design is the quote. A person closes the large deal, late |
| Design the system | Integrator or vendor sales engineer, who also builds the bill of materials and the price | Agent composes from components with published prices; the cost falls out of the design. A person sets intent and signs off |
| Build and integrate | Integrator engineers, vendor professional services | Agent builds and tests in software-defined environments; a person verifies. Physical and RF stay human |
| Install | People | People |
| Run | NOC shifts, managed service provider, vendor support contract | Agent-run, human-supervised: a small expert team and one accountable name |
| Support | Vendor helpdesk, first and second line humans, partner first line | Customer's agent talks to vendor's agent; a person at the top of escalation |
| Bill and renew | Annual licence, purchase order, reseller paperwork | Usage-based and metered; the customer's agent manages renewals and cost |
What follows
The design is the quote.
Nobody quotes a cloud system. The design is composed from components with published prices and the cost falls out of the plan. The same thing is coming for broadcast systems. That leaves a vendor a fork: be a component with a published price and a spec, or be a system that supplies its own reference design. The opaque middle, priced as a system and unable to be composed, is the dead zone. It's most of the hall.
Are you willing to publish a price?
"Call us" protects margin, the deal desk and the reseller. An agent can't work with "call us". It estimates, or it excludes you. That's a commercial decision, not a product one, and most CEOs flinch at it. The flinch is the conversation.
Cheaper to run is easier to sell.
A product agents can deploy and run costs less to deploy and run. So it wins more, closes faster and can be priced on usage. Revenue, not savings. Likely. Unproven in broadcast, and I'll say so until it isn't.
This is a CEO job.
Product owns the API. Sales owns the price. Finance owns the billing. Partners own the channel. None of them can move the others. Only the CEO can.
Where this could be wrong
Broadcast is a small world. A few hundred vendors that matter, buyers who already know the ten names in any category, relationships that go back twenty years. Discoverability may be worth less here than anywhere, and the machine shortlist may not bite for five years.
Broadcasters buy on risk, not price. "Agent-run" reads as "nobody accountable" until the vendor can name who is. Public service broadcasters have procurement law. Air-gapped sites limit what any agent can reach.
That's what I'm checking at IBC. If broadcaster technology teams tell me they never ask a model when they scope or select vendors, this needs rewriting, and I'll publish that too.
Tell me where I'm wrong Ten minutes, before or during the show.