When not to build an AI agent (and what to ship instead)

A SaaS founder asked us to second-opinion a roadmap his CTO had come back with after an "agentic AI" vendor pitch. The plan was eighteen agents, a planner LLM, an executor LLM, a critic LLM, six months of build, and a 5x increase in their model spend. The current product was a chatbot that answered customer FAQs about their billing portal. About 80% of incoming questions were five variations of "how do I export my invoice as PDF." The remaining 20% routed to a human agent because the chatbot di...