Build the support agent, or buy one?
Work · Board of 3We get 9,000 support tickets a month and have two engineers free in Q1. Build our own support agent on LangGraph, or buy one off the shelf at about $1 a resolution?
Chief of staff
This is a board call: The Engineer, The CFO and The Customer. They sit on different AI models, research alone first, then react once to one another.
The EngineerTechnical Builder
The CFOFinancial Controller
The CustomerUser Voice

Asked first
How many of the 9,000 tickets are the same twenty questions?
Most of themAbout halfFew
The board’s call
Buy for the first two quarters, and build only the billing flows the vendor can’t reach.
If half the tickets repeat, a bought agent resolves them within weeks for about $4,500 a month. Two engineers for a quarter cost more than that — and they would still be building the parts nobody sees: evaluation, the hand-off to a person, the fallback when the model is wrong.

The Engineer disagreed
“Every month on a vendor is a month your ticket data improves their product, not yours”
Board of 3 · about 95 credits on the card · an example, not a recorded run








