What a company keeps if it switches AI agent providers

What happens if a year from now this isn't working and we have to switch providers? The short answer is that it depends on five assets, each with its own owner, and that all five get settled when the contract is signed rather than when somebody wants out.

None of the five questions below is hard to answer. What's rare is anybody asking them in time.

What are the five assets of an agent in production?

The phone number and the account it's registered in. The conversation history. The instructions and the knowledge base. The integrations against the company's systems. And the record of what the agent did, along with the test cases used to verify that it works.

Each one can end up on the company's side or on the provider's side, and there's no default: it's a configuration decision that almost never gets discussed.

Why is the WhatsApp number the most delicate asset?

Because it doesn't live loose. A number gets registered in a WhatsApp Business account, and Meta's documentation is explicit on two points: that account belongs to a single business portfolio, and an account can't be migrated from one portfolio to another. What is supported is moving a number between providers, and sharing access to the account with up to two partners.

The practical consequence is the whole difference. If the account was created inside the provider's portfolio, the company doesn't own the account: it's a guest. Getting that back isn't a migration, it's building a new account, with business verification again and templates again. If the account was created in the company's portfolio and access was shared with the provider, switching providers means revoking an access.

It's the same amount of work on day one. It's an enormous difference on the day you want out.

Can the conversation history be taken along?

It depends on the format they hand it over in, and that's the right question. "Yes, it can be exported" might mean a structured file another system can read, or a spreadsheet with the plain text of the conversations and no metadata, which is good for reading and not much else.

It's worth asking for a sample of the real export during the evaluation, not a yes or no answer. It's a two minute test that ends up being worth the whole contract.

Who owns the instructions and the knowledge base?

In terms of content, the company: they're written about its process, its tone and its catalogue. In practical terms, whoever holds them in a format that can be copied and used somewhere else.

It's the asset carrying the most accumulated work after a year in production, because every correction ever made to the agent ended up there. Asking for a periodic export, even with no intention of using it, is cheap and saves discovering the format on the day there's an argument.

What isn't portable, whatever the contract says?

The integrations and the test cases. The integrations are code written against the company's systems and against the provider's platform at the same time: the half facing the CRM carries over, the half facing the platform doesn't. Test cases can be handed over as text, but running them again on another platform is work, not an import.

Saying the opposite would be more comfortable and it would be false. Real portability covers the data and the knowledge, not the implementation.

What's worth asking before signing?

Four questions, in this order. Which business portfolio the WhatsApp account will be created in. How the history gets exported and with which fields. How the instructions and the knowledge base get exported. And what happens to the integrations if the contract ends.

A provider who answers all four without getting uncomfortable is telling you something about how they work, beyond the answers themselves.