Budgeting for Agentic AI in 2027: What to Ask Every Vendor

Ishita Jaiswal, Head of Growth at Multimodal, interviews Ankur Patel, CEO &amp; Founder of Multimodal.<br /><br />📩 Subscribe to the Main Street AI Newsletter: https://multimodal.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=podcast&amp;utm_medium=description&amp;utm_campaign=podcast<br /><br />Multimodal builds agentic workflows for credit unions and community banks, covering member experience and lending operations. Ankur argues that a 2027 budget has to fund three things at once, an account on one of the big three models for every single person, a hard look at whether your incumbent vendors are opening their software up or walling it off, and a few net new agentic partners, with every vendor pushed to show simulated usage numbers before anyone signs.<br /><br />Guest: Ankur Patel, CEO &amp; Founder, Multimodal<br />Host: Ishita Jaiswal, Head of Growth, Multimodal<br /><br />0:00 Introduction: Meet Ishita<br />0:57 The two categories of agentic AI<br />2:39 Where credit unions start on personal productivity<br />3:15 Leadership, stewards, and uneven adoption<br />6:06 Member experience and lending operations<br />8:12 Why growth beats cost efficiency<br />9:19 Three pieces of budgeting advice for 2027<br />13:20 Walled gardens and the SaaS apocalypse<br />16:19 Usage pricing, tokens, and simulated numbers<br />20:04 What Multimodal built for credit unions<br />23:43 The ROI bar and the tuition expense<br />25:56 Closing