Strategy, ROI &amp; Build vs Buy

Build vs buy AI systems: the practical decision framework

Most teams should buy before they build, but not always. A decision framework for AI tooling, workflow automation, RAG, agents, privacy, integration depth, total cost, and strategic differentiation.

9 min read

AI ROI and maturity: how to measure adoption that actually works

AI adoption should not be measured by how many people tried ChatGPT. A practical framework for measuring workflow ROI, quality, risk, maturity, and scale-readiness.

13 min read

Shipping an LLM product: pricing, margins, and the anti-moat trap

LLM-powered products face economics that are harder than traditional SaaS. Variable costs that scale with usage, margins squeezed by inference, commoditization risk, and competitors with the same foundation models. How to build a product that's actually defensible — and the patterns that lead to LLM startups that disappear.

More in this topic

7 min read

The automation you should delete: maintenance cost and quiet failure

A practical audit for deciding which automations to keep, repair, simplify, or retire — including ownership, breakage, hidden review work, and silent-failure risk.

Intermediate

56 minutes

AI Agents in Finance with HPE's Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

CXOTalk. HPE CFO Marie Myers describes rolling agentic AI (their "Alfred" platform) across a 3,600-person finance organization with the discipline the article argues for: a direct-versus-indirect ROI framework, stage gates that decide whether each use case continues or stops, mandatory human-in-the-loop quality controls, and workflow-level metrics such as a weekly review process losing roughly 90% of its manual effort. Adoption is measured as changed work, not tool logins.

41 minutes

Private AI vs. Cloud: How Enterprise Leaders Can Make Smarter Build-or-Buy Decisions

World Wide Technology. Connects build-or-buy choices to business outcomes, workload placement, cloud economics, data sovereignty, security, infrastructure readiness and hybrid operating models. That makes it a useful strategic companion for deciding when to buy a tool, extend a platform, build a thin custom layer or own more of the deployment stack.

30 minutes

EU AI Act Explained: Turning Compliance into Competitive Advantage | Carme Artigas

MSP GLOBAL. Carme Artigas chaired the Council negotiations that produced the AI Act, and here she explains it to managed service providers — the companies SMEs actually buy AI through. She walks the phased timeline, from the August 2025 GPAI code of practice to the August 2026 conformity-assessment deadline, and the concrete obligations that follow, such as requiring compliance documentation from vendors. That is the same inventory, vendor-evidence and ownership work the article turns into an operating plan.

37 minutes

VMware Private AI Foundation Capabilities and Features Update from Broadcom

Tech Field Day. Shows private AI as layered infrastructure: controlled compute, isolated environments, Kubernetes, inference containers, model governance, self-service provisioning, GPU sharing and monitoring. That maps directly to the article's warning that privacy depends on deployment boundaries, logs, access and operations, not on the word "local."

9 min read

EU AI Act for SMEs: a practical governance plan

The EU AI Act is not just a legal problem for large vendors. A practical SME plan for inventory, risk classification, human oversight, transparency, vendor records, and rollout discipline.

10 min read

Private AI deployment patterns: local, VPC, self-hosted, and hybrid

Private AI is not one architecture. A practical comparison of local models, enterprise SaaS, VPC deployments, self-hosted inference, and hybrid patterns for SMEs that care about privacy and control.

42 minutes

Vertical AI Agents Could Be 10X Bigger Than SaaS

Y Combinator. The Lightcone hosts work through why vertical AI agents — not horizontal wrappers — are the defensible shape for application-layer companies, with concrete examples and a clear-eyed take on which categories the model providers will eat. That is the anti-moat trap the article warns about, expressed as a positive playbook.

34 minutes

How AI is Reinventing Software Business Models ft. Bret Taylor of Sierra

Sequoia Capital. Bret Taylor walks through the shift from per-seat SaaS to outcomes-based pricing — what to anchor on (resolution, CSAT, NPS), why incumbents struggle to follow, and how vertical specialisation creates pricing power. It directly mirrors the article's pricing and margin sections.