Should we build our own AI agent or buy a ready-made one?
The short answer
Almost no company should build the AI model itself. That part you buy. The real decision is who owns the part that knows your business: your instructions, your rules and the connection to your systems. Buy where the work is the same in every company. Own the part that depends on how your company works.
Three layers, not one decision
“Build or buy” sounds like one choice. It is really three:
- The model. This is the engine that reads and writes. Very few companies in the world build one. Everyone else uses one built by someone else.
- The connection to your systems. This is how the agent reaches your ERP system, your files and your email.
- The knowledge and the rules. This is what the agent knows about your business, what it may do on its own, and what it must bring to a person.
The model is the same for everyone. The knowledge and the rules are what make an agent yours. That is the part to own.
Buy where the work is the same everywhere
Correcting the language of a letter, summarising a public report, translating a text: this work is the same in your company and in your competitor’s. A ready-made product does it well, and it improves without any effort from you.
Own the part that is only yours
Your approval rules, the way your team judges a new client, the history of your projects, the exceptions only your people know. If these live inside a vendor’s product, then on the day you leave that vendor, your agent forgets your business.
A choice we made
At OdooTec, a colleague suggested a ready-made connector between AI and our ERP system. It was run by a third party that we did not know and had no reason to trust. We decided against it. We built our own connector instead, and we run it on our own server.
The question was not whether that connector worked. The question was who would control the path between our AI and our business data. With the ready-made one, the answer would have been someone outside our company, and that was enough to say no.
The questions to ask before you buy
- Where does our data go, and who can see it there?
- If we leave this product, what do we take with us? Our instructions, our rules, our history?
- Does it reach our systems with our own permissions, or only through its own copy of our data?
If the answers mean you would leave with nothing, the vendor owns the most valuable part of your agent.