Should you build or buy your agent? It's a hard call to make. I was chatting with a merchant this week. They run a big business, with very thin margins. They are running on our helpdesk but built their own AI agent. We discussed it together, using the same latest OpenAI model, with solid QA, well integrated into their system, they built something solid. I took up the challenge of selling them our own AI agent. At first I thought: these guys are hyper optimized for cost, given how much checks+evals we run on our own, we won't be able to make the ROI worth it. Then I discovered some interesting points: - Their agent was escalating to humans more than it should. Even with offshored hired directly at $4 an hour, that cost added up. Cost: ˜15k a month - Customers were getting upset when the AI hallucinated. Cost: 5k a month in chargeback - AI is fun to build (I'm addicted to hit with my 100+ sessions a day!) but running it in prod every day creates hidden maintenance work you don't see at first. Cost: usually less than buying here At the same time, like I shared a few days ago on building our own internal AI platform for Gorgias, when your use case is very specific to your business, build makes a ton of sense. But what I'm finding for AI agent on ecom customer support on Shopify, there's enough similarities between brands to make the math more favorable on the buying side.