Product teams need a build-vs-power agent strategy

Tanay Jaipuria frames a 2026 product strategy choice: either build the agent users open every day, or power the horizontal agents they already use through MCP, APIs, CLIs, and action surfaces. Why it matters: AI products are becoming capabilities that agents can compose, not just standalone interfaces. Teams need to decide whether their moat is a full vertical workflow, or proprietary data and actions that should plug into Claude, Codex, Copilot, ChatGPT, and similar agents.

Try this: Map one product against four questions: where customers already work, whether you own the full workflow or a slice, whether value is reasoning or data/actions, and whether the job needs high-control judgment or composable execution.