KenTaniguchi-R · KenTaniguchi-R · Aug 3, 2026 · Aug 3, 2026
diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -6,6 +6,16 @@ which are released together.
 
 ## Unreleased
 
+### Documentation — GTM sequencing and privacy positioning
+
+- Keep the first design-partner segment focused on non-EU, non-unionized
+  100–500-person engineering organizations and measure senior-time recovery.
+- Preserve the live-routing/no-central-corpus distinction while retiring the
+  ambiguous “we do not ingest employee data” claim; any stronger future claim
+  must separately name content confidentiality and retained metadata.
+- Gate regulated and EU expansion on shipped security, audit, retention,
+  administration, runtime, residency, and worker-governance controls.
+
 ### Opt-in local OpenTelemetry
 
 - Propagate a bounded caller correlation ID across relay, listener, lifecycle

diff --git a/docs/research/2026-07-31-demand-validation.md b/docs/research/2026-07-31-demand-validation.md
@@ -11,6 +11,13 @@ actual state of enterprise agent adoption, and what stops deals?
 > firewall” sentence. The open position is narrower: governed, person-scoped delegation
 > to the callee's own agent, with caller-specific pre-prompt policy and audit evidence.
 > See [the MCP positioning decision](../superpowers/specs/2026-08-02-mcp-positioning-design.md).
+>
+> **Amended 2026-08-03.** “We do not ingest employee data” below is too broad. The
+> relay processes plaintext calls and centrally retains metadata and authored card
+> content. The accepted claim is that AgentCall does not retain a central corpus of
+> call prompts/replies or index connected mail, chat, and documents into a persistent
+> twin. The initial non-EU beachhead remains. See the
+> [GTM sequencing decision](../superpowers/specs/2026-08-03-gtm-sequencing-design.md).
 
 ---
 

diff --git a/docs/research/2026-07-31-enterprise-pivot-research.md b/docs/research/2026-07-31-enterprise-pivot-research.md
@@ -5,6 +5,12 @@
 **Companion doc:** [2026-07-31-agent-coordination-landscape.md](./2026-07-31-agent-coordination-landscape.md)
 (broad market map). This doc covers the enterprise in-network pivot specifically.
 
+> **Amended 2026-08-03.** The “we don't ingest your data” line below is too broad.
+> The hosted relay processes plaintext calls and persists metadata plus authored card
+> content. The accepted distinction is no retained central corpus of call content and
+> no indexing of connected mail, chat, and documents into a persistent employee twin.
+> See the [GTM sequencing decision](../superpowers/specs/2026-08-03-gtm-sequencing-design.md).
+
 ---
 
 ## The proposed direction

diff --git a/docs/research/2026-08-01-cotal-enterprise-installability.md b/docs/research/2026-08-01-cotal-enterprise-installability.md
@@ -146,11 +146,15 @@ review; **D** is competitive parity; **E** is positioning.
       semantically the same object. Conforming buys interop cheaply and avoids competing
       in the standards game — which is Cotal's fight against Google's A2A, and the
       hardest game in infra.
-- [ ] **Reconcile GTM sequencing with the differentiator.** The demand doc sequences
+- [x] **Reconcile GTM sequencing with the differentiator.** The demand doc sequences
       non-EU, non-unionised 100–500 person orgs first. Our sharpest differentiator —
       "we don't ingest your employees' data" — is worth most to exactly the EU-exposed
       and regulated buyers that sequencing defers. One of the two should move.
-      Confidence: **medium**; this is an inference from two docs, not new research.
+      **Resolved 2026-08-03:** keep the initial segment, lead with measured senior-time
+      recovery, and narrow the differentiator to no retained central call-content
+      corpus or indexing of connected employee systems. The absolute ingestion line
+      is not accurate for the hosted relay. See the
+      [GTM sequencing decision](../superpowers/specs/2026-08-03-gtm-sequencing-design.md).
 
 ---
 

diff --git a/docs/research/README.md b/docs/research/README.md
@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ produced in. Later research revised earlier conclusions, so the production order
 | 7 | [cotal-enterprise-installability](./2026-08-01-cotal-enterprise-installability.md) | Which tool does an enterprise actually install — and what has to be true for it to be ours? |
 | 8 | [mcp-tunnels-ema-positioning](./2026-08-02-mcp-tunnels-ema-positioning.md) | What did MCP tunnels and EMA actually ship, and where should MCP sit beside A2A? |
 
-Five notes on the sequence:
+Six notes on the sequence:
 
 - **#3 predates two decisions made the same day.** `agent-coordination-landscape` was
   written before the sandbox was dropped and before Q&A-first was chosen. Its
@@ -54,6 +54,11 @@ Five notes on the sequence:
   private-network reachability a substitute rather than differentiation. EMA supplies a
   useful enterprise-authorization shape, but no non-MCP compatibility claim. The
   companion decision keeps A2A as the public protocol and defers an MCP facade.
+- **#7's GTM conflict is resolved.** Keep the first beachhead at non-EU,
+  non-unionized 100–500-person engineering organizations, lead with measured
+  senior-time recovery, and preserve the narrower no-retained-call-corpus/no-connected-
+  system-indexing distinction. The absolute “we do not ingest employee data” line is
+  retired. See the [GTM sequencing decision](../superpowers/specs/2026-08-03-gtm-sequencing-design.md).
 
 ## The five findings that matter
 

diff --git a/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-03-gtm-sequencing-design.md b/docs/superpowers/specs/2026-08-03-gtm-sequencing-design.md
@@ -0,0 +1,171 @@
+# GTM sequencing and privacy positioning
+
+> **Historical design record — not current documentation.** This file records the
+> decision made for issue #22. Current product behavior lives in `README.md`, current
+> data handling in `docs/security/`, and open work in GitHub Issues.
+
+**Date:** 2026-08-03  
+**Status:** Accepted product decision  
+**Issue:** [#22](https://github.com/KenTaniguchi-R/agentcall/issues/22)
+
+## Decision
+
+Keep the initial buyer sequence from the demand research: start with non-EU,
+non-unionized, 100–500-person engineering organizations. Do not make the first
+pilot carry EU residency, works-council consultation, and regulated-enterprise
+procurement at the same time that it is proving the core product value.
+
+Keep the privacy architecture as the long-term differentiator, but narrow the
+claim and change its role in the first sale:
+
+- **Economic headline:** recover senior engineering time now spent answering
+  repeat questions. Measure hours recovered and time to first useful answer.
+- **Trust proof:** AgentCall does not retain a central corpus of call prompts and
+  replies or index connected employee mail, chat, documents, and meetings into a
+  persistent digital twin. It routes a request live to the employee's own agent
+  and applies caller policy before the request enters that agent.
+- **Current limitation:** do not say “we do not ingest employee data.” The hosted
+  relay still processes plaintext call content and stores identity,
+  relationship, policy, and audit metadata. Cards also centrally retain
+  employee-authored descriptions, task catalogues, examples, and keywords;
+  endpoint-local logs retain bounded prompt/reply excerpts. The exact
+  no-call-corpus claim is true today; a stronger content-confidentiality claim
+  is gated on #13.
+
+The beachhead and the moat therefore do not need to be the same sentence. The
+first segment optimizes for learning speed. The architecture preserves a path
+to buyers for whom a centralized employee-knowledge corpus or persistent twin
+is disqualifying.
+
+## Segment sequence
+
+### Phase 1 — prove value in a low-friction engineering team
+
+Target non-EU, non-unionized engineering organizations with 100–500 employees.
+This segment is a product inference from the adoption-cycle and interruption
+evidence, not a directly observed conversion result. Run a bounded pilot in one
+team. Lead with a concrete baseline and outcome: senior hours spent answering
+repeat architecture questions, time to first useful answer, repeat-question
+rate, and answer quality verified by the owner.
+
+Every callee is a volunteer. Before setup, each receives the current
+`docs/security/employee-transparency.md`, explicitly opts in, and can stop the
+listener or withdraw from the pilot without manager approval. Non-unionized is
+an adoption-sequencing choice, not permission to skip informed participation.
+
+Before launch, the sponsor and pilot security owner sign one measurement
+protocol that fixes:
+
+- the repeat-question categories and measurement window;
+- one observation per relay-minted call ID, with transport retries deduplicated;
+- every admitted call in those categories as eligible, including refusals and
+  failures after admission; pre-admission failures are excluded;
+- one required owner rating per eligible call, with an absent rating counted as
+  not useful rather than removed from the denominator;
+- time to first useful answer starts at the first authenticated, in-scope caller
+  attempt for a question and ends when the first reply later rated useful is
+  delivered; pre-admission failures, admitted failures, and questions with no
+  useful reply are reported rather than dropped, and the protocol fixes the
+  aggregation statistic and no-result treatment before launch;
+- the same named participants, weekly time-diary instrument, and question
+  categories for baseline and pilot time measurement; and
+- a written security-severity rubric, including what constitutes critical
+  unauthorized disclosure or out-of-policy execution.
+
+The protocol and exclusions cannot change after the first pilot call. Any
+exception is reported separately and does not silently change the denominator.
+
+Privacy is part of the security answer and competitive contrast, not a substitute
+for measured value. A buyer who does not care about the no-corpus boundary should
+still understand why the product pays for itself.
+
+### Phase 2 — regulated non-EU expansion
+
+Enter regulated or procurement-heavy accounts only after endpoint security,
+organization policy, tenant-scoped audit export, retention/erasure behavior,
+administrative identity, SSO, and bounded runtime authority are implemented and
+can be demonstrated. Sell enforcement as the product foundation and evidence,
+retention, export, SSO, and support as enterprise value only after each named
+control ships. This is a packaging direction, not a committed price or edition
+matrix.
+
+### Phase 3 — coordinated EU offering
+
+Treat an EU offering as a separate deployment and adoption profile, not a region
+toggle. It requires all Phase 2 controls plus the data-residency adoption gate in
+`docs/security/data-residency.md`, employee transparency, and customer-led legal,
+privacy, and worker-representation review.
+
+That ordering remains correct even when a particular AgentCall use is not
+classified as high-risk under the EU AI Act. The Act requires workplace notice
+for deployment of high-risk systems and links deployer duties to GDPR impact
+assessment where applicable; German co-determination separately covers technical
+systems intended to monitor employee behavior or performance. Product
+architecture can make those reviews easier, but cannot remove them.
+
+## Entry and exit gates
+
+| Phase | Enter when | Advance when |
+|---|---|---|
+| 1 — low-friction pilot | A sponsor and pilot security owner are named; 3–10 volunteer callees record informed opt-in; a two-week repeat-question/time baseline exists; the eligibility, rating, missing-data, time-diary, exclusion, deduplication, and security-severity protocol above is signed before launch | After at least four weeks and 50 eligible questions: at least 70% are owner-rated useful, weekly senior time spent answering eligible repeat questions falls at least 20% from baseline, and zero critical unauthorized disclosure or out-of-policy execution occurs. AgentCall's product owner and the customer's pilot security owner jointly decide advancement. |
+| 2 — regulated non-EU | The public/enterprise C-track gate (#1–#8), organization administration and SSO (#15/#102), tenant audit/export plus implemented retention/erasure (#17), bounded call/runtime budgets (#181), and the exact endpoint policy promised to the buyer are shipped and tested | A regulated design partner completes security and procurement review using deployed evidence, and the customer's security owner accepts the documented residual risks without roadmap controls being presented as current. |
+| 3 — EU profile | A named EU sponsor approves an exact regional claim and funds a deployment plan; customer privacy and worker representatives approve the pilot process before employee enrollment | A new regional deployment passes every verification step in the living residency adoption gate; retention and transparency behavior are tested; customer legal and security owners approve the exact deployed claim. |
+
+No calendar date substitutes for these gates. A named customer may change
+priority, but it does not make an unimplemented control true.
+
+## Messaging contract
+
+Use:
+
+> Recover the hours senior engineers lose re-answering architecture questions.
+> AgentCall routes each question to the colleague's own agent, under that
+> colleague's policy, without retaining a central corpus of call content or
+> indexing connected mail, chat, and documents into an employee-knowledge twin.
+
+Do not use:
+
+- “We do not ingest employee data.”
+- “EU compliant,” “GDPR compliant,” or a residency claim derived from a
+  Cloudflare location hint.
+- “Audit-ready” while tenant export, bounded retention, erasure, and delivery
+  evidence remain unimplemented.
+- token- or currency-budget claims when the product can bound only calls and
+  agent runtime.
+
+## Why the alternative loses
+
+Starting in the EU because the privacy distinction is most valuable there would
+combine three unknowns in the first sale: whether the workflow saves enough
+time, whether employees accept it, and whether the deployment satisfies regional
+and worker-governance requirements. A failed pilot would not reveal which
+assumption was wrong.
+
+Dropping the privacy distinction to simplify the first sale would push AgentCall
+into the shared-corpus category it is structurally designed to avoid. The right
+move is sequencing: prove economic value where deployment is lighter, while
+building the controls required to take the same architecture into harder
+accounts honestly.
+
+## Revisit triggers
+
+Revisit this sequence when any of these occurs:
+
+1. a named EU design partner will sponsor the coordinated residency and
+   worker-governance work rather than accept roadmap language;
+2. three Phase 1 pilots show that no-corpus architecture materially improves
+   conversion or shortens security review enough to outweigh the longer EU
+   adoption cycle;
+3. Phase 1 buyers consistently reject the product despite measured time savings
+   because they need retained knowledge after employee departure; or
+4. the hosted relay's confidentiality, residency, audit, and erasure contracts
+   change enough that the messaging limitations above are stale.
+
+## References
+
+- [EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689](https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A32024R1689), especially Article 26 on deployer obligations and workplace notice
+- [German Works Constitution Act §87](https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/betrvg/__87.html) on co-determination for technical monitoring systems
+- [Cloudflare Data Localization Suite](https://developers.cloudflare.com/data-localization/) and [Customer Metadata Boundary](https://developers.cloudflare.com/data-localization/metadata-boundary/), which are separate enterprise controls rather than defaults
+- [Stack Overflow 2024 Professional Developers Survey](https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/professional-developers/) for the interruption baseline; the chosen company-size and regional beachhead remain an inference
+- [AgentCall cloud data map and residency decision](../../security/data-residency.md)
+- [Demand validation](../../research/2026-07-31-demand-validation.md) and [enterprise pivot research](../../research/2026-07-31-enterprise-pivot-research.md)