AI Agents in Automation: When to Build, When to Buy
InformationWeek, Monday, May 11th, 2026
Enterprises must balance building custom AI agents with buying prebuilt solutions, prioritizing orchestration and operationalization over the build-versus-buy decision itself.
The article examines whether organizations should build custom AI agents or purchase prebuilt solutions for enterprise automation.
While buying offers faster deployment and lower costs, it often limits agents to single applications, whereas building custom agents provides greater control and cross-system capability but requires significant complexity management.
Rather than viewing this as a binary choice, most enterprises benefit from a blended strategy using both purchased and built agents. The key to success is agentic orchestration, which acts as a control plane to integrate deterministic logic, agent reasoning, and human oversight while maintaining governance, visibility, and auditability across enterprise processes.