AI has made building software dramatically faster, and that puts the build-vs-buy question back on the table.
Agentic coding tools have opened up new possibilities to teams that never had the time or budget to create their own software. Compared to paying, that can be an attractive prospect. For a lot of companies, this brings up a question they may have never asked before AI: should we just build this ourselves?
Sometimes the answer is yes. But a fast build is only one part of the job.
Why is build vs. buy worth asking again?
Build vs. buy has always come down to tradeoffs. Buying gets you something proven, supported, and ready on day one. Building gets you something shaped around how your business works.
For most companies, the case against building was simple: it took too much time and too much effort. AI has dramatically reduced both. Work that once needed a dedicated team and months of runway can now be built and iterated on in a fraction of the time.
Buying still makes sense in plenty of cases. But a decision made years ago, under very different math, may be worth examining again.
What happens when a quick app becomes something people depend on?
Picture an operations team that builds a small tool to manage equipment requests. It takes a day, and it works. Within a few months, three departments are using it, it’s connected to the inventory system, and someone in finance pulls a report from it every week.
At some point, the business is running on it. But it was never made to carry that weight. Nobody wrote down how it works or decided who owns it. It isn’t known whether a change to one feature breaks the inventory connection or the finance report. Every update becomes a small gamble, and every workaround makes the next fix harder.
When something eventually breaks, nobody’s quite sure how it works. Fixing it means someone has to untangle a tool the whole operation now depends on, usually under pressure.
That’s what tech debt looks like in practice: shortcuts taken early that the business keeps paying for later. Even simple software builds it up once people rely on it, which is why building quickly doesn’t mean you can skip design and governance.
Where did the work go?
Most of the effort in software used to go into the build itself: writing code, fixing it, and writing more. Agentic delivery compresses that stage dramatically, and teams can iterate far more quickly than before.
The rest of the work is still there, though, and now it makes up most of the effort.
Before the build, someone has to decide what the tool needs to do, who will use it, which systems it touches, and what data it handles. AI builds what it’s asked to build, so the quality of that plan shapes everything that follows. A vague plan used to slow a project down. Now it gets built quickly, exactly as vague as it was.
After the build, the tool has to be tested against real use, connected to the systems around it, and rolled out to the people who will rely on it. Then it needs governance: clear ownership, rules for how changes get made, and a plan for keeping it secure and current as the business changes.
Those stages are easy to underestimate when the middle feels effortless. They’re also what turns a quick app into a tool the business can trust.
So when does building make sense now?
When a team is ready to own the work around the build, too.
That means deciding what a tool needs to do before anyone starts, testing it before people depend on it, and knowing who maintains it and how changes get made. Teams that treat those steps as part of the project can build tools that last. Teams that skip them end up with software that works on day one and becomes a problem by month six.
It also comes down to the numbers. Bought software carries costs that add up quietly: license fees, per-seat pricing that climbs as a team grows, and paying for features nobody uses. Building used to cost so much more upfront that those subscriptions were easy to justify. With AI shrinking the cost of the build, the comparison looks different. A fair comparison still counts the full cost of building, though: the time spent planning, testing, hosting, and maintaining the tool for as long as the business uses it.
For many companies, building is a realistic option for the first time. It’s worth doing properly. And if that’s not possible? There are still advantages to buying.
Ready to rethink what you build and what you buy?
Building fast is the easy part now.
Innovative Solutions helps organizations with everything around the build. Our Forward Deployed Engineers embed with your team to plan what’s worth making, test and roll it out, and put governance in place so internal tools hold up long after launch. Talk to our team about which of your tools are worth building.
