Should we build or buy enterprise AI?
Buy the commodity layer — models, CCaaS, orchestration platforms — and build only what encodes your differentiation: retrieval over your content, integrations with your systems of record, and evaluation of your outcomes. The real comparison is not licence versus engineering; it is total cost of ownership including integration, evaluation and the run state on both sides.
Last reviewed 2026-08-31 · pronix.ai — specialized AI & CX systems integrator
What the numbers show
First-party figures from Pronix research. Each links to the report or playbook that publishes it.
- 25–35%
- Foundation-model tokens account for 25% to 35% of total cost of ownership for a mature enterprise LLM workload.Source: Enterprise LLM Cost & TCO Benchmarks 2026 →
- 60–75%
- Cheap-first cascade routing — attempt the cheapest capable model, escalate on a confidence check — moves 60% to 75% of traffic to the cheap tier with no measurable quality regression.Source: Enterprise LLM Cost & TCO Benchmarks 2026 →
- 31%
- Retrieval, integration and evaluation infrastructure is now the single largest line in the enterprise AI budget at roughly 31% of spend.Source: State of Agentic AI in the Enterprise 2026 →
External references
- ISO/IEC — ISO/IEC 42001 — AI management systems (2023)The certifiable management-system standard enterprise procurement increasingly asks about.
How we know
Differentiation test
If a capability would look identical at a competitor, buy it. If it depends on your data, policies or workflow, build and own it.
Exit cost belongs in the model
Vendor lock-in shows up as migration effort later; portability of prompts, retrieval indexes and evaluation sets keeps the option open.
Hybrid is the common answer
Most enterprises buy the platform and build the retrieval, integration and evaluation layer on top — which is where the measurable advantage sits.
Related questions
- Is fine-tuning a build decision?
- Usually not first. Retrieval quality, prompt structure and evaluation coverage resolve most accuracy gaps before fine-tuning is justified.
- What is most often underestimated when buying?
- Integration and change management — the licence is rarely the largest line in the first two years.
- What is most often underestimated when building?
- The operate cost: evaluation, drift monitoring and content maintenance after launch.