If you cancel your AI agent in two years, what do you keep?
"Give the agent access to your email, the shared drive and the customer system, and it will learn how your business works."
That is the pitch now, and there is a good story behind it. A team at Anthropic described how their AI assistant became a working member of the team. It started by answering questions. Then it kept a tracker current. Now it asks the team leads for updates every Friday and writes Monday's agenda from whatever it could not resolve. In the speaker's words, it has more context about that meeting than any of the managers.
It works because it sees everything the team sees.
Give a rented tool the same access and it starts holding how your business decides things: which customer always pays late, when the lead technician ignores the price list, which job looks simple and never is. Your team learns to work through it. Whether any of that survives a switch depends on where it lives, and few owners ask before they sign.
So ask the vendor one question. If we cancel in two years, what do we keep?
Part of the answer should already be on your side: a written record of how each job gets decided, in a document you own, that you can hand to the next tool and decide what each one sees.