Angelina YangFounder and Host, TwoSetAI · AI builder for visibility and discoverability

Build or Buy AI Agents? The Answer Might Surprise You

9 Apr 2026 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker evaluates three approaches to acquiring AI capabilities for a business: (1) building the technology in‑house, which offers close alignment with business logic but requires the organization to have the necessary expertise; (2) buying the AI technology alone and handling integration internally, allowing the company to retain business proximity while leveraging external advances; and (3) buying both the technology and its integration services, which provides a turnkey solution that embeds the vendor’s expertise with the firm’s domain knowledge. The speaker highlights a key risk of the in‑house route: the rapid pace of AI research means that today’s focus can become obsolete quickly, making it hard for internal teams to keep up with emerging hot topics. Consequently, external technology can offer a timing advantage, ensuring access to the latest capabilities without the lag of internal development.

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I think building in-house is a good point as you can be close to the business logic. But at the same time, you need the right technology to push forward current limitations. So either you can buy this technology and then integrate by yourself in the company because you'll have the business proximity and so on. Let's say the teams are not really working on those subjects, then buying makes sense so that you have the integrated technology and it will be rather working with this company that will integrate regarding the knowledge, regarding the business logic and so on. Either you can buy just the technology or you can and also buy the integration with it. And the third path is definitely build in-house. But today, one limitation of building such systems in-house is it's going very, very quickly. And so you cannot work on old subjects in AI. The next hot subject you will need, the technology you will need, was something you did not consider before. So from a timing perspective, having external technology can be helpful.