Build or Buy? How to Decide Your Approach to AI Agents and Automation

Almost every business leader has now heard that AI agents can handle tasks over and over again, connect their systems, and free their teams from hours of manual effort. It’s not about how to take them on but how. Create a solution for your process that is right for you, or modify it to fit your process by using an existing platform?

This is one of the most fruitful technology choices the company can make this year, and the correct solution will vary depending on your circumstances. Here’s a no-brainer approach to it.

What These Tools Actually Do

It is important to make sure you are precise with the build before comparing it to the purchase. Today’s AI agents are more than just chatbots. They’re most useful when taking an instruction, thinking it through, and performing multiple applications to accomplish a process: reading from one system, deciding what to do, and writing to the other.

The latter part is most important. The actual content of the conversation is seldom the value. It’s the power to link together the many distinct tools that a company operates and transfer work between them without having to click around manually. Typically, in the middle range is 80 to 150 applications for a mid-sized business, and the same time-consuming and error-prone manual process is what good automation eliminates.

The Case for Building Custom

It’s worth considering a custom solution, typically with a proven development partner, in certain situations.

If your processes are truly unique and are important to your competitive advantage, then it is better to build. In some cases, however, you may be doing things with your workflows that shelf models of tools are not well suited for, and in that case, you can put your logic into a custom build. This is also true if there are particular data residency, security, or integration considerations with legacy systems that the standard platform does not meet.

Custom development is also a successful choice when you want complete control of the code and intend to work on a solution for a number of years. There is a cost-benefit trade-off between time and money. Most companies that do this do not do it on their own, but rather they work with a dedicated software development team, as serious building requires competent engineers, a precise specification, and regular maintenance.

The Case for Buying a Platform

For a large share of common processes, an existing platform gets you there faster and cheaper.

As long as the needs are reasonably sized and standardized, and it is reasonable to have a standard contract, it is a good time to consider procurement, transfer of a closed contract to finance, synchronizing customer records, and automatic onboarding. These issues are ubiquitous, and there are platforms that have been developed for this purpose that do not require custom code. Tools like Noca AI sit in this space, letting teams describe a process in simple language and have AI agents, sometimes called digital employees, assemble the working integration across applications.

Ease of access and quickness of appearance draw them there. When engineering is not involved, the person who knows the business issue can likely construct the workflow. The trade-off is that you lose control and reliance on the vendor’s roadmap, something that many regular use cases are willing to pay for.

A Practical Example of the Difference

Think of something that you know. A sales team completes a sale, and a NetSuite quote goes into a finance order, a delivery project has to be created with the proper WBS element in SAP, and the customer’s support has to be created.

If this process is standard for your business, an AI agent platform can automate it in days, no code required. However, if the plan is something out of the ordinary, there are new things to be taken into account when it comes to regulations, or customization of SAP that is not readily understood by any of these platforms, then that is where an experienced team’s custom build comes in for the asking. Just as with HR integration, and all other cross-platform processes, the rule applies: standard favours buying, unique favours building.

Many Companies End Up Doing Both

The smart thing to do is more of a combination in practice. Handle a variety of common automations with ease and cost, and have a few unique processes custom-developed to fit your business at a reasonable cost.

It’s a hybrid that will convert you to the normal workflow faster without sacrificing your freedom to do different things when necessary. It also helps to prevent the two common pitfalls of designing more complex solutions with custom code that is very expensive and putting an inflexible platform into place to solve a problem it wasn’t designed to address.

How to Make the Decision

A few questions will usually point you in the right direction:

• Is this process standard or unique to us? Standard leans buy, unique leans build.
• How fast do we need it? A platform is the right strategy for urgent needs, a build will be justifiable for strategic and long-term systems.
• Do we have the technical resources? A capable in-house or partner development team makes building realistic. Without one, a platform is safer.
• How much will it change? Stable processes suit either approach. Rapidly evolving logic you fully control favours building.

Conclusion

The answer of build or buy is not a right or wrong one, but rather one that can be defined by the specific situation. The companies that reap the most benefits from an AI agent work at the pace of an AI agent: they buy speed for their regular work and only construct where their uniqueness makes it worth their while.

Begin by drawing out your process to quality & uniqueness. This one exercise tells you about most of what you need to know, and avoids spending too much on custom work that you don’t need.

FAQs

1- What is an AI agent in business terms?
Answer: A system that reads an instruction, determines action, and then performs that action throughout your software to accomplish a task, not merely answer a question.

2- Is building or buying cheaper?
Answer: Generally, standard processes are less expensive and quicker to buy. Costs more, but meets the special requirements of which you are the sole architect.

3- Can we combine both?
Answer: Yes. For the majority of companies, most of their automations are on a platform, and customized code is used for processes unique to their business.

4- Where should we start?
Answer: Normalize your processes, and mark them as standard or unique. For the regular ones, use a platform first, and then evaluate if they truly require a custom build.