Why We Don’t Build Everything Ourselves

Three Months of Agent Building Taught Us When to Stop and Reap the Benefits of Composable AI Architecture

Part 5 of The Accidental Agentic Enterprise series. [Start with Part 1 here.]

Author: John Pettifor

Composable AI architecture on Salesforce enabling ISV agent integration for professional services firms There’s a version of our story that could sound like we want to do it all.

Over the past three months, we’ve built what we’d argue is one of the most composable AI architectures in the Salesforce ecosystem. Three layers. A universal orchestration fabric. Agent Charters. Purpose-built MCP servers. A Delivery Intelligence™ stack designed to touch every corner of how a professional services firm actually operates. Our team has become, without much exaggeration, some of the best agent builders in the ecosystem right now.

So when Certinia launched Veda, it would be fair to ask: why wouldn’t you just build those agents yourselves?

The answer is one of the most important things we’ve learned on this journey.

We Already Run on Certinia. That’s the Point.

We’ve been on Certinia for years. We chose them for the same reason most services-led businesses on Salesforce eventually do. It’s purpose-built for how consulting actually works. Resource planning, project delivery, billing, customer success, all on one platform, all native to Salesforce. When it works, it’s the kind of clarity that’s hard to describe until you’ve lived without it.

Veda Is Different from Generic AI

When Certinia started building Veda, they weren’t building AI on top of generic data. They were building on top of decades of institutional knowledge about what services delivery looks like at scale, across hundreds of customers and every shape of professional services organization you can imagine. Veda is grounded in that domain expertise. It’s not just AI pointed at a prompt.

When Veda’s Reallocation Agent looks at your bench, your open assignments, and your project timelines, it knows what a staffing problem actually is — because it’s been trained on what staffing problems look like across the entire professional services industry.

No single firm can replicate that. That’s not a gap in our capabilities. That’s the whole point.

When to Build and When to Activate

This was the quiet lesson of the past three months.

The real AI building leverage

We started out assuming the answer to almost every problem was “we can build that.” And we can. But the further we went, the more we realized that a composable architecture changes the question entirely. It stops being “should we build this?” and becomes “where should this capability come from, and how do we connect it cleanly?”

Because our orchestration layer treats every agent as a modular capability rather than a fixed dependency, integrating Veda wasn’t a multi-month project. We had a secured, governed agentic suite covering our professional services operations in a matter of days.

Resource managers got time back. Project managers got on-demand summaries across financials, risks, and staffing. Customer success workflows ran with less manual overhead. And every one of those agents will keep getting better, because Certinia learns from their entire customer base, and those improvements flow directly to us.

The Maintenance Advantage

There’s another part of this worth naming. Certinia handles the maintenance. As Salesforce evolves its platform, Certinia adapts Veda to match. As new features ship in their regular release cycle, the agents pick them up. That’s ongoing upkeep we don’t have to do. A custom-built agent would need constant attention to stay aligned with platform changes. A Certinia agent just keeps working.

The Opportunity Sitting in Your Existing Stack

Most firms haven’t done this yet: pick up the phone and call your trusted ISVs. Ask them what they’re building agentically. You’ll find more than you expect: agents shipping in the next two or three release cycles, built on the same deep domain expertise that made you choose those platforms in the first place.

Composability Is the Deciding Factor

If your architecture is ready, the productivity gains are immediate.

That’s the real unlock. Not any single agent or any single vendor — but recognizing that the ISVs already running critical parts of your business are now shipping agentic capabilities grounded in the same data and domain knowledge that made you trust them to begin with. The firms that architected for composability get to capture that value as it rolls out. The firms that didn’t will spend the next two years retrofitting.

In Practice, the Speed Gains Are Real

Certinia building Veda is a gift to every firm that runs on their platform. Not because it removes the need for expertise — you still need people who understand how to configure, govern, and extend these agents inside your architecture. But because it compresses the starting point dramatically.

“What used to require manual coordination across sales, delivery, finance, and customer success now happens with far less friction and far greater speed. The ability to have AI that understands our business context and acts on it, rather than simply reporting on it, is what makes Veda a meaningful step forward for us.”
— Uriah Hakala, SVP Professional Services, Diabsolut

That’s the accidental agentic enterprise working exactly the way it’s supposed to.

You don’t set out to build the most sophisticated AI architecture in the ecosystem. You set out to run your business better. You make one composable decision at a time. And then one day, when a company like Certinia ships something like Veda, you just plug it in.

That’s not luck. That’s architecture.

Diabsolut is a Salesforce consulting partner building the agentic enterprise in the open. Follow the series to see what’s working, what we’re learning, and what’s coming next.

Talk to our team.