It depends on whether AI is your product or your tool. If AI is core to your competitive advantage — your recommendation engine, your fraud detection, your pricing model — building gives you control, customization, and defensibility. If AI is a productivity tool — summarizing documents, drafting emails, automating support — buying (or using APIs) is almost always faster and cheaper.
The middle ground is fine-tuning: take a foundation model and adapt it to your domain data. This gives you customization without the full cost of training from scratch. Most enterprises should start by buying, identify where generic solutions fall short, and build only in those gaps.
This question reflects common advisory themes. It is editorially curated, not sourced from individual conversations.
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