By 2025, 88 percent of companies reported using AI in at least one business function. Agentic systems that can plan, decide, and act on your behalf are growing even faster, which forces a clear choice for the executive leadership:
- What do you build?
- What do you buy?
- What do you hand off to implementation partners?
In the last year, I have seen this question move from theory to the top of real project reviews. One CIO I worked with started the year with a dozen unconnected AI pilots. After we sat down and sorted them into “build, buy, or delegate,” they shut down a few experiments, moved most of the routine use cases onto a single vendor platform, and focused their team on two core agents tied directly to revenue. Six months later, they had fewer tools to manage, clearer results to show the board, and a much stronger story about where AI fits in the business.
Why the Agentic AI Framework Decision Matters Now
Agentic AI models have moved from pilots to production.
- One Agentic Enterprise Index reported a 119 percent increase in active AI agents in the first half of 2025.
- The same index found that agent led customer conversations increased by more than 20 times over that six-month period.
- Global surveys show that around 62 percent of organizations are already experimenting with agents, and 23 percent have begun scaling them in at least one function.
These trends mean the decisions you make in the next 12 months will shape your cost base, risk profile, and speed of change for years.
Start with Agentic Outcomes, not Tools
The question is not “Should we build an agent platform?” It is “What result do we want, and how unique is the capability we need to get there?”
A simple way to decide is to sort use cases into three buckets:
- Core: Direct drivers of revenue or margin, such as pricing, underwriting, trading, or network planning.
- Context: Important but common processes, such as IT support, HR support, finance close, and field operations.
- Commodity: Basic tasks every company needs, such as summarizing documents, routing requests, or running simple assistants.
This map makes it easier to see where to build, where to buy, and where to delegate.
Agentic AI Project Plan: When to Build
Build for core capabilities where control and uniqueness matter most.
You should lean toward building when:
- The agent reflects how you make money, such as a risk engine or planning agent built on proprietary data and models.
- You must meet strict regulatory and audit requirements and need full visibility into how decisions are made and logged.
- You have the people and budget to run an internal AI platform; high performing organizations often spend more than 20 percent of their digital budget on AI and data platforms.
Focus your build work on:
- An internal agent fabric with orchestration, policy rules, logging, and model routing.
- Shared tools and connectors into your main systems, so each new agent reuses what you already have.
- A small set of high impact agents that tie directly to revenue growth, risk reduction, or structural cost savings.
Agentic AI Project Plan: When to Buy
Buying makes sense when speed and coverage matter more than custom design.
Recent enterprise spending analysis shows that only about 24 percent of AI solutions were built in house in 2025, while 76 percent were purchased as platforms or applications, a sharp flip from the year before. This shift is happening because:
- Platform deployments can move from idea to production in days or weeks instead of months, especially for common use cases.
- Most of the tens of billions invested in enterprise generative AI in 2025 flowed into applications and platforms, reflecting a focus on time to value rather than custom builds.
- Many firms report that talent and complexity are their top barriers; even with AI in use, fewer than 25 percent say they have scaled it across most processes.
Buy for:
- Context use cases like customer service, sales, IT help desks, and knowledge search, where platforms already support hundreds of implementations and baked in best practices.
- Cross cutting capabilities such as monitoring, safety, and compliance that would be slow and costly to recreate.
- Access to strong models and infrastructure that are kept current by the vendor.
Your teams then focus on how these tools fit into your architecture, security model, and operating processes.
Agentic AI Project Plan: When to Delegate
Delegation means asking a partner to deliver a complete outcome as a managed service.
This is useful when:
- You are running large scale change and need your own teams focused on security, data, and integration, which remain top three priorities in many CIO surveys.
- You want business results backed by service level agreements, for example in contact centers or back-office operations that handle millions of customer interactions or transactions.
- You want to test agentic approaches without long term platform commitments or heavy up-front build.
Delegation works best when you own goals and metrics, and the partner owns day to day delivery and continuous tuning.
Where Agentic Application Modernization Fits
Many CIOs still spend 60 to 80 percent of their IT budgets maintaining legacy systems, and modernization programs often run over budget or stall. Agentic systems can act as “modernization copilots” that scan codebases, flag dead or duplicate logic, suggest refactoring, and auto generate test cases, cutting manual effort by up to 50 percent in some programs.
A 2024 study by McKinsey also finds that AI‑driven modernization can accelerate timelines by 40 to 50 percent and reduce the cost of technology debt by about 40 percent. This makes it easier to decide what to rebuild internally as strategic capability, what to move onto bought platforms, and where to delegate migration work to specialized partners.
Read more: Agentic Application Modernization Reality Check
A Simple Three Step Agentic AI Project Plan
Here is a straight path you can use to guide your roadmap.
1. Prove value quickly
- Buy agentic tools for one or two visible use cases in sales or service.
- Track simple metrics like handle time, resolution rate, or conversion lift, and compare them to your current baseline.
- Share results with your board and business leaders to build support; organizations that report “quick AI wins” are significantly more likely to keep funding AI at scale.
2. Standardize and simplify
- Reduce tool sprawl and pick a small set of core platforms that cover most use cases.
- Create shared patterns for security, integration, and governance so teams can launch agents without reinventing controls.
- Start to build light orchestration around your own data and policies so you can swap models or vendors without breaking flows.
3. Build your edge
- Decide which agent capabilities truly set you apart in your market, such as pricing intelligence, risk decisions, or supply chain optimization.
- Build these on your internal framework using a mix of open source, private models, and vendor components.
- Measure success using revenue, margin, and long-term cost, not just project level savings or short-term automation wins.
Questions to Ask Your Team
Use these questions to guide your next leadership discussion:
- Which two or three business outcomes should agents improve for us this year, and by how much?
- For each outcome, is the needed capability core, context, or commodity?
- Where can we live with a vendor roadmap, and where do we need full control over the stack?
- How many separate agent platforms can we realistically support in three years, and what is our target number?
- What is the minimum shared fabric for security, logging, and integration across all agents, regardless of where they come from?
90-day Next Step
Run a one-hour working session with your direct reports. List every active and planned AI or agent project, map each one to core, context, or commodity, and mark whether you are building, buying, or delegating today. In many enterprises, this quick review exposes duplicate tools, underfunded differentiators, and at least one-use case that can move into production within 90 days.
Get Started
If you want a second set of eyes on that portfolio, talk to our team. A short working session with us can help you stress test your build-buy-delegate mix, map where agents can accelerate application modernization and quantify the impact on cost and risk. Together we can turn your list of projects into a clear roadmap you can share with your CEO and board.
Get in touch with Presidio today
