Productized agents are plug-and-play tools built on agentic backends. You pay for a seat, like any SaaS. They tend to go deep in one vertical and take care of everything behind the scenes — prompt tuning, tool orchestration, reliability, etc.

Why buy a productized agent:

• Great for high-stakes or complex use cases where you want reliability without managing the backend.

• If you want something that “just works” with no setup.

Why not:

• Hard to customize. Want to tweak how the agent works? Not always possible.

• Often expensive for just one agent. You might be locked into one workflow.

• Integrations can be limited — e.g., a meeting notes agent might summarize well but struggle to push updates to your internal tools.

Why no-code might be better:

• You get flexibility. Build and adjust your own agents without needing to write code.

• You can go beyond out-of-the-box use cases and automate the last mile of your team’s workflow.

Bottom line: Productized agents are great if you want simplicity and reliability. No-code is ideal if you want breadth and adaptability without writing code.

Building vs. buying is a common crossroads for teams working with AI. If you have engineers, it’s tempting to build in-house — more control, potentially lower cost. But agents are evolving fast. What works today might be outdated next month.

Building in-house means giving your engineers raw SDKs and dev tools (like for prompt management, evaluations, etc.) and having them construct custom agents for your workflows.

Why build:

• Full control over how the agent behaves and integrates with your stack.

• Makes sense if your workflow is deeply custom and there’s nothing quite like it on the market.

Why not:

• It pulls engineering time from core product work.

• Getting an agent to prototype is easy. Getting it to work reliably is not.

• Models get deprecated, tools evolve — maintaining quality requires continuous effort.

Bottom line: If you’re okay with investing engineering bandwidth into building and maintaining internal tools, go for it. Otherwise, buying may save you time and headaches.