The Build vs. Buy Dilemma for AI Software

FAQs

• What's the difference between building and buying AI software?

  Building means your team develops and maintains the capability in-house. Buying means licensing it from a vendor who handles scalability, performance, and uptime. Building gives you full control on day one but shifts all the maintenance, security, and technical debt onto your team. Buying trades some of that control for speed, predictable costs, and reliability at scale.

• When does building make sense?

  Build when the capability is core to how you compete, when no vendor fits your data model or workflow, or when regulatory requirements rule out third-party data ownership. The catch is that the real cost isn't V1. It's the ongoing engineering effort to maintain, patch, and keep pace as the business changes.

• Why can't I just use a general-purpose LLM for everything?

  Because not all AI is the same. Large language models are probabilistic, so they can generate different outputs from the same input and can't always explain their reasoning. That's a problem for commercial decisions like pricing or compliance, which need consistent, auditable, explainable results. Purpose-built AI is trained and tuned for that specific work, with the controls and validation built in.

• What's the hidden cost of building in-house?

  Technical debt and knowledge concentration. A V1 that works in testing is different from a system that runs reliably at scale, and closing that gap takes months. Once it's built, the knowledge of how it works often lives with one or two people. When they leave, you're maintaining something the team can't fully fix or extend.

• How does Conga fit into a build vs. buy decision?

  Conga provides the scalable, secure infrastructure so your team focuses on outcomes instead of maintenance. A common approach is a blend: buy the governance, execution, and compliance layer, then build the proprietary models or business logic that reflect your specific advantage on top. The infrastructure gets bought; the differentiation gets built.