We spent fifteen years moving everything to SaaS. The pendulum is about to swing, and agents are what swing it back.
Walk into a typical company today and the agents already exist. They are just scattered. One lives inside a contact-enrichment tool. Another runs inside a marketing platform. A third is buried in some workflow product that wraps a fourth tool underneath it. Each one is doing real work, and not one of them is under the company's control. You cannot see what they cost. You cannot inspect what they do. When you need one to behave differently, you wait on a vendor's roadmap.
That is a bad place to put your operations. If agents are going to run the connective tissue of your business, the glue between your ERP, your accounting system, and your CRM, then running that glue inside ten different black boxes means you have delegated your entire company's operating logic to people who do not work for you.
The sources of truth are not the problem. You will still have a system of record for inventory and a system of record for finance. Those stay. What was always custom was the glue between them: the brittle API a team spends months lining up box by box so orders flow from one system into the next. That glue is exactly the part that should become agentic, and exactly the part that should sit under the direct control of an operational person rather than a SaaS vendor.
The right shape is a clear box, not a magic one. Bring your own model key, so it is your money and your spend, visible down to the tokens used and the cost per run. An audit trail of who changed what and when. A control room where every agent is editable and every run is inspectable. This is the inspectable-logic stance over black-box magic applied to operations, and it is why controllability beats magic for any enterprise team that has to answer for what its systems do.
The new internal software does not look like the old internal software. It is a mesh of agents you own, not a monolith you maintain. But the principle is the same one operators have always known: the special, valuable work is the glue, so keep it inside the building.
Key takeaways
- Running agents inside a dozen SaaS products means you lose visibility into cost, control over behavior, and the ability to change them on your own timeline.
- Sources of truth like ERP and accounting stay, but the glue between them should be agentic and owned directly by the operator.
- Bring-your-own-key plus a transparent control room gives a company full visibility down to tokens and cost per run.
FAQ
Why not just use SaaS tools that handle the agents for you?
Because the agent becomes a magic box. You cannot see the cost, you cannot inspect the logic, and when you need a change you are at the vendor's mercy. Delegating your operations to third-party services means delegating control of your company.
Does this mean abandoning systems of record like the ERP?
No. Sources of truth stay. What changes is the integration layer between them. The custom glue code that used to be brittle scripts should now be agentic and live under the operator's direct control.
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