Four to eight weeks for a first agent that is properly integrated. One to three weeks for each one after that.
If someone quotes you a week for the first, they are selling you a widget that can talk but not act. If someone quotes six months, you are talking to a consultancy and there is a six-figure invoice attached.
What the range actually depends on
Almost entirely your systems, not the AI.
Connecting to a modern platform with a clean documented API is quick. Connecting to a legacy billing system where one internal developer owns every endpoint, and that developer is busy until March, is where projects stall.
We have learned to scope that dependency first and build everything else in parallel around it. The conversational logic is usually ready in days. The integration to pull a customer's real account data is what sets the go-live date, nearly every time.
So when a partner asks about your stack before they ask about your use case, that is a good sign rather than an evasion.
Roughly how the weeks go
Week one. Discovery. Read the existing tickets, pick the two starter lanes, map the data sources, write the tone of voice guide. That last one matters more than it sounds and gets skipped constantly.
Week two. Integration build, agent in shadow mode. It watches real traffic and generates what it would have said, without a customer seeing any of it.
Week three. Shadow-mode tuning. Compare what the agent would have said against what your team actually said, and close the gap. This is where the value is, and where impatient projects cut.
Week four onwards. Live on the first lane, narrow. Maybe a fifth of traffic. Monitor closely, tune daily, widen as it earns it.
The mistake that costs the most time
Going live too early.
Shadow mode looks like nothing is happening, so it is the first thing squeezed when someone wants a launch date. Then the first three months become learning in public, and a public incident costs more to recover from than the fortnight you saved.
Longer in shadow is almost always cheaper than a rebuild after a customer screenshots something wrong.
What you can do to speed it up
Get the system access sorted before the build starts. Names, credentials, API docs, and a person who can approve things without a two-week wait.
Pick two ticket types, not ten. Specific ones. "Bill queries that arrive by email" and "tier-one router troubleshooting on WhatsApp" is a brief. "Customer service" is not.
And appoint one internal owner for the first ninety days. Not a committee. Someone who sits in the weekly review and can make a call. Deployments without that go stale within a month of launch, and the timeline that matters is not four to eight weeks, it is whether the thing still works at month six.
