Build, buy or twin: choosing an AI GTM approach
Subscribe to a tool, build your own agents, or have custom agents built and run for you. The trade-offs, without the vendor spin.
Every B2B leader we speak to is being asked the same question by their board: what is our AI plan for pipeline? There are three honest answers, and the right one depends on what you have.
Buy a tool
AI SDR products are real and improving. They suit companies with a clean ICP, a maintained database, a messaging system that already works and someone to operate the tool daily. If you have all four, a tool is the cheapest path. Most companies have one or two, and the tool becomes a very fast way to send bad messages to the wrong accounts.
Build your own
Companies with an engineering team and GTM operations maturity can assemble agents from platforms and models. The advantages are control and data ownership. The cost is time: six to nine months to production in our experience, plus ongoing maintenance, plus the fact that the engineers building it have never booked a meeting.
Have a twin built
The middle path is custom agents designed and run by people who know GTM, on a platform they control, handed over with the operating rhythm. This is what we do. It suits companies that want the economics of agents without the year of learning, and want to own the result at the end.
The question to ask any option
Who decides which accounts deserve effort, and how did they learn? If the answer is 'the model', ask what it was trained on. If the answer is 'you', ask how much of your week that will take. The right approach is the one where judgement is designed in, not left to whoever is nearest the keyboard.
An honest hour-by-hour account of a production agent working a B2B pipeline, including the parts where it asks a human.
Why most intent programmes produce the same accounts as everyone else's, and how to tune one to your own history so it stops.