Build or Buy AI agents - Introduction

I have shared some information about build or buy on my LinkedIn but I will do a longer deepdive at a later stage.

The build or buy question is highly linked to the operating model and no business can just do it without proper investments into resources.

If you want to build your own agents as a business, you need to invest in the team, upskill, maintenance, monitoring etc in order to build and maintain high performance AI agents in your supply chain.

If you prefer to buy the agents, you need to have someone capable of buying them. My instinct will be to have a dedicated AI agent category manager within the procurement team. This category manager then must manage the supplier(s) and their performance like any (critical) category.

If you want to have a hybrid model, you need to find a way where you both have the capability to build and to buy AI agents. Hybrid is very likely a preferred scenario for many as it will feel natural to build AI agents for critical processes and buy AI agents for repetitive non-critical tasks.

The monitoring of the agent performance is complicated. Each supplier typically provides some kind of dashboard or login function but this will be truly annoying if your business uses multiple AI agent providers plus maybe some internally built agents.

More to follow

// Andreas