Orchestration Ownership Line

The Orchestration Ownership Line marks where an agency's control ends and a vendor's begins. Agent builders split into three layers: the visual shell (flows, branding, channel routing), the orchestration layer (memory, tool calls, state, retries), and the model layer. Agencies that buy only the shell can resell an agent quickly, but the client's switching cost stays near zero because the vendor holds the orchestration. Agencies that own orchestration, whether through typed behavior modules or an embedded editor wired to their own execution engine, keep the integration and governance work that justifies a retainer. The line matters commercially: Forrester notes that AI vendors now set usage limits, gate features, and arbitrate disputes over their own tools, so a shell-only build hands pricing power to a third party. A concrete test: ask which party debugs a failed tool call at 2am on a client deliverable. If the answer is the vendor's support queue, the agency rents the workflow rather than owning it.