
Agent Builders Guide 2026: Managed vs Custom AI Agent Solutions
Executive Summary Managed Agent Solutions (MAS) are cloud-managed platforms for building, deploying, and operating AI agents. They remove the need to manually set up infrastructure for orchestration, memory, tooling, tracing, guardrails, and evaluation, allowing teams to reach production faster. MAS have matured from early, UI-focused experiments into platforms that support production workloads across many GenAI use cases. They are not a universal solution. Custom agent solutions are still required when teams need advanced observability, custom evaluation, strict cost control, portability, or complex orchestration.































