Chris Wykel
Director of Generative AI. Building production AI systems in industrial manufacturing.
01 / About
I build AI systems that run in production, not in demos.
I lead generative AI at Legrand NCA, where I build and ship AI systems across more than 60 subsidiaries in industrial manufacturing. This is not a research role, nor is it a slide-deck exercise. The systems my team delivers handle real work, and they have to hold up under the operational, regulatory, and commercial pressure that comes with a multi-billion-dollar industrial portfolio.
My writing focuses on a structural shift that most organizations have not yet fully internalized: the web is moving from a human-navigated medium to an agent-mediated one. Buyers no longer browse ten blue links and pick, they ask an AI, and the AI picks for them. When the AI names your competitor and never mentions you, share of wallet quietly migrates before the revenue line reflects it, however the leadership team that understands the shift early can defend the top line and open ground that slower movers cannot.
The technical thread running through this work is the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, which is emerging as the standard interface that AI agents use to discover and query the systems they rely on. If your catalog, your documentation, and your commercial data are not exposed through MCP, you are invisible to the agents your buyers already trust, and that invisibility compounds quarter over quarter. I write about how to close that gap before it shows up as EBITDA erosion.
02 / Writing
The Future Is Agentic.
A six-part series on how AI agents are reshaping product discovery, what it means for your business to be invisible to those agents, and why MCP is becoming the standard that decides who gets found. Each piece draws from operating experience, not theory, and each one was published first on LinkedIn.
Your Customers Are Searching. AI Is Answering. Your Business Isn't in It.
When a buyer asks an AI which vendor fits their need, the model answers with the handful of names it already knows. If you are not in that set, you are not losing the search, you are absent from the conversation entirely.
Why Your Business Is Invisible to AI Agents
Your site ranks, your catalog is indexed, your SEO team reports green, and yet the AI recommending a purchase to your buyer has never heard of you. The gap between ranking well and being agent-readable is the gap most teams have not closed.
Your Competitor Is Already in the AI Model
The model has a memory, and somewhere in its training corpus your competitor is well represented while you are a footnote. This is not a ranking problem, it is a presence problem, and presence is won through structured, agent-readable exposure over time.
Google's Role in Product Discovery Is Being Disintermediated by MCP
MCP lets an agent query your product data directly, bypassing the search results page entirely. When the agent does not need to click through Google to reach you, the economics of discovery shift, and the intermediary that once taxed every journey loses its tollbooth.
03 / Speaking
Talks drawn from operating experience.
The Future Is Agentic
An overview of how AI agents are replacing the human-navigated web as the default path to product discovery, and what that means for revenue, brand, and channel strategy. Grounded in systems shipping today, not roadmap promises.
Why Your Business Is Invisible to AI
A practical breakdown of the gap between ranking well on a search results page and being present in the answer an AI model gives a buyer. Covers the concrete signals agents look for and the structural changes required to provide them.
Building Production Agentic Systems in Manufacturing
How a 60-subsidiary industrial portfolio deploys AI that holds up under real operational load, covering architecture, governance, the difference between a demo and a system of record, and the organizational discipline required to keep the line between them clear.
MCP: The Interface Standard Your Buyers' AI Is Already Using
Why the Model Context Protocol is becoming the connective tissue between AI agents and the systems they query, and what your organization needs to expose, structure, and govern so that buyers' agents can actually find and understand your offering.
04 / Career
Where the work comes from.
– Present
Director of Generative AI
Legrand NCA
–
Sr. Operations Systems Manager
Legrand NCA, EWS Division
–
President
BitCipher
–
IT & Data Processing Manager
Sarstedt, Inc.
–
Systems Administrator / Fractional CIO
Boomtown CIO
–
Manager of IT
Boston National Settlement Services
05 / Contact