How to engage with Canary
Five engagement modes, each with a different audience, commitment level, and outcome. Most merchants do not start with a full operating-system swap — they enter through a lighter mode and graduate as the value compounds.
| Mode | Audience | Commitment | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operating system | Retailer | Long-term, run-the-store | Replace backoffice; agents run the loops |
| Transformation | Retailer + SI partner | Project-scoped (3–9 months) | Apply 1990s-era best practices SMB never got because the integration cost was enterprise-scale |
| Audit / health check | Retailer | Weeks | Operational diagnosis; KPI baseline; remediation roadmap. No platform commitment. |
| Channel — build on top | VAR, partner, developer | Integration scope | Build vertical extensions on the platform; resell or extend |
| Internal — our own shop | GrowDirect | Always-on | Dogfood; live reference customer in production, in public |
Choosing a mode
The lowest-commitment entry is the audit / health check. Bring Canary in for a four-week diagnostic against your transaction history, inventory positions, and AP records. Get a quantitative read on the leaks — phantom inventory, uncaptured discounts, vendor compliance gaps, shrink attribution holes. Output is a baseline KPI report and a remediation roadmap. No platform commitment. The conversion path is clear: if the audit surfaces enough opportunity, transformation is the next step.
The fullest commitment is the operating system mode. Canary becomes the merchant's retail backbone — backoffice eliminated, agents run the operational loops continuously, the merchant manages strategy and signs on financial decisions. This is the long-term resting state for merchants who have validated the value through audit or transformation.
The other three modes — transformation, channel, internal — are concurrent surfaces, not exclusive paths. A merchant in operating-system mode may run a transformation engagement to migrate from a legacy stack. A VAR may build a vertical extension while the merchant runs in operating-system mode. The internal mode (GrowDirect running on Canary) is always-on, regardless of how any merchant engages.
A note on the SI partner channel
Canary's commercial path runs through SI partners (specifically, NCR Counterpoint VARs in V1). The platform is designed for the partner to deliver and the merchant to operate. The transformation mode is the primary commercial vehicle: the SI scopes the engagement, the platform runs, and the merchant pays subscription plus the SI's delivery fees. This is a channel model, not a direct-to-merchant cold-start.