Orchestration Depth Ladder

Orchestration Depth Ladder ranks agent-builder platforms by how much of the client workflow the agency actually owns: prompt shell, tool-call routing, memory and state, multi-step orchestration, and finally governance and testing. Most agencies buy at the bottom rung and quote the top rung. The gap is where margin leaks, because a branded chatbot built on Chipp or FormWise is replaceable in a week, while the integration, audit trail, and evaluation harness around it is not. Forrester's September 2026 finding that private deployments outperform shared public models for B2B marketing makes the point commercially: differentiation lives in owned context and controls, not the model call. Climb one rung per quarter against a named client workflow, and price the retainer against the rung you can defend, not the demo you can show.