As AI headlines accelerated through 2025, costing remains one of the hardest areas for leaders to “get grounded” on. In this episode, Greg Banks sits down with Tim and Nancy for a true apples-to-apples comparison: building a customer-facing AI agent using Salesforce Agentforce + Data Cloud versus building a custom AI agent from modular components.

Using a realistic vignette—Terrapin Pet Care, a direct-to-consumer pet wellness brand—the team evaluates both approaches across five criteria: solution fit, technical feasibility, procurement complexity, implementation costs, and operational costs.

Takeaways

• A practical 5-part evaluation rubric for agent platform vs custom build decisions. 
• Why procurement complexity often favors platform approaches (fewer decisions; consolidated SKUs). 
• Why long-run operational costs may favor custom builds (cutting out the “wrapper”/middle layer). 
• How assumptions about your existing stack and team skill sets can change the recommendation.

Recommended Links

Cirrius Solutions 

Cirrius Blog

Tim Harting on LinkedIn

Nancy Roller on LinkedIn

Pydantic AI

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Crawl 4 AI: 

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Comparison Artifact

Greg Banks on LinkedIn

Jason Fowler Music

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