Build vs. Buy in the Age of Agentic AI

For thirty years, build versus buy had a comfortable default: you bought. Agentic coding broke it. Building got cheap — a first version that took a quarter now takes days — while every vendor started baking AI into the products you already pay for. Both sides of the decision shifted at once, and the call got harder, not easier.

In this episode, Chris Bradley turns that call from a gut check into a decision you can defend. The move is a better question — not “build or buy?” but “how much orchestration does this work actually need?” That question sorts every AI decision into the Three Tiers of Agentic Orchestration. Tier one: work that lives inside a single app — buy the AI already there. Tier two: work that crosses standard systems — bridge them with an orchestration platform. Tier three: work that runs through your customized core, where the pre-built connectors run out — build it, with a custom agentic harness.

He walks each tier with real examples — including the order-processing harness Veritiv built, why buy couldn’t reach the customizations and bridge couldn’t connect what only they run, and how a small team got working versions in weeks, not quarters. Humans stay on the exceptions and the judgment calls; accountability stays with people.

Then the trap: lock-in. Buying an AI platform means adopting an entire AI operating system. Building means one non-negotiable — stay model-agnostic, so the layer that makes a model reliable also makes it replaceable. And the honest limit: the cost that collapsed is the cost of the first version, not the cost of ownership. The maintenance didn’t vanish. It moved downstream.

Buy the plumbing. Build the edge. And point the people you free toward the customer.