When Off-the-Shelf AI Is Enough and When It Is Not

Buy when the process is common

Transcription, general writing assistance, meeting notes, generic chatbots, document search over standard formats. These are solved, cheap and improving without you paying for it.

Building your own version of a commodity product is the most reliable way to spend forty thousand pounds on something worse than a subscription.

Build when the specificity is the value

• The AI must read your master data to be correct
• The output must land in a system with no off-the-shelf connector
• Your terminology and rules are genuinely unusual
• The workflow is your competitive difference, not a generic one
• Data cannot leave your environment for regulatory reasons

The hidden cost of buying

The subscription is rarely the cost. Getting your data in, getting the output out, and the manual copying in between is where a cheap tool becomes an expensive process.

Price the integration work honestly on both sides before comparing. It frequently reverses the conclusion.

The hybrid answer

Buy the capability, build the connection. Use a commercial platform for the model and interface, and build the integration that makes it fit your business.

That is a fraction of a full build and it captures most of the specificity benefit, which is why we recommend it more often than either extreme.

Questions that settle it

1. Does a product exist that does 80% of this?
2. What does the remaining 20% cost in manual work per month?
3. Can the product be connected to our systems, and at what cost?
4. Is our process genuinely different, or just familiar?
5. Over three years, which total is lower?

Frequently asked questions