A prospective client forwarded us a "WordPress audit" last year. It was a one-page PDF from a security plugin: a green checkmark next to "no known malware," a list of out-of-date plugins, and a recommendation to upgrade to the vendor's premium tier. The site, the report concluded, was healthy.

A few years ago, the operations dashboard was a settled science. You counted tickets closed, tasks completed, hours logged, and calls handled. Stack those activity metrics against headcount and you had a clean story about productivity: more people, more output, roughly linear.

Then you put agents into the loop — and the dashboard started lying to you.

Something quietly inverted in Salesforce delivery over the last year, and most teams haven't repriced their work to match. An agent can now author a permission set, refactor an Apex batch class, write the test coverage, generate a data-migration script, and open a clean merge request — in minutes, without complaint, at a level of craft that would have been a mid-level developer's afternoon. The bottleneck everyone spent a decade optimizing — can we build it fast enough? — has largely dissolved.

Short answer: Buy an off-the-shelf agent when the job is generic and the data is standard — you'll be live in weeks. Build custom when the agent runs on your proprietary data and workflows and becomes a competitive moat. In practice, most businesses land on a managed middle path: custom where it differentiates, bought where it doesn't, with a partner running both.