Ep 866: Build, Buy, Partner, or Wait: The 4-Layer AI Stack Decision Framework for 2026 (Start Here Series, Vol 25)

Jordan Wilson (0:00)

Welcome to the Everyday AI Podcast. My name is Jordan Wilson, and for the past three and a half years, we've put out more than 800 episodes. Yet, one of the most common questions I get, I didn't really have an answer for. Where do I start on the Everyday AI Podcast? And that's why we started the Start Here series. And with the fall now back in full swing, the Everyday AI Podcast is going back to school and playing the entire Start Here series from front to back. We've hit pause on our normal Monday to Friday programming to run back our most popular series ever for the next 30 days. We made the Start Here series for beginners and AI champions alike. So whether you're just trying to get a grasp on large language models, or grappling with the best coding harness for multi-agentic workflows, the Start Here series covers it all. Plain language, no jargon, and easy to follow along each day. So make sure to subscribe to the podcast and check back each day for new insights, day by day. The series is a culmination of spending more than 10,000 hours covering generative AI over the past three and a half years. So you don't want to miss a single episode of the Start Here series. Let's get into it.

If you're still asking whether to buy or build AI, yeah, you're already behind. The question was a hot topic and made a ton of sense in the early days of generative AI in 2023 when rag pipelines and AI chatbots were cutting edge and your company had to make a choice to either build something fairly complex on new technology or try to take business advantage of a consumer chatbots. But the buy versus build question doesn't make a ton of sense in 2026 That's because AI agents take actions inside your business software, compile your data while you sleep and complete real workflows and outputs without much input from you. So your company's AI decision is no longer a single choice. It's actually at least four. That's because AI lives in at least four different layers of your company. I mean, the model itself, the workflows it runs, your data and context, and the business software it plugs into. And for each layer, you have four choices. You could build it yourself, buy it from a vendor, partner with someone who has the expertise, or wait until the category settles down a bit.

But get one wrong and you wind up being in technical debt. Get another wrong and you lock yourself into a vendor, you can't escape or miss out on a new line of revenue that your competitors all seized. It's easier said than done. Yet, I think this conversation is one of the most basic conversations being overlooked in boardrooms everywhere. That's why today we're walking through every layer, every choice, and exactly when to make each one. So you can stop guessing and start owning the right pieces. So this is Everyday AI, and this is part of our Start Here series. But before we go any further, let me just paint the big picture. So, AI is different than it was. And I think back in the 2023, 2024, when companies were still deciding if AI was for them, the decision really boiled down to, okay, are we going to use a consumer chatbot, right? Back then it was Bard, the early days of Claude, Copilot and ChatGPT. There was no business context. So you either had to say, okay, well, we're going to try this thing and maybe risk it, or we're going to build a pretty expensive custom rag setup, right? We're going to build this rag pipeline and bring in all of our data. And a lot of times that was a very expensive, long and tedious process. But this is all shifted because AI now, off the shelf, AI is made for businesses. And it's not just giving answers via a chatbot, it's executing real work inside of the actual software that you use. So, a new McKinsey study actually said that 88% of organizations regularly use AI in business. I'm always, side note, I'm always confused by these stats. I'm like, what are the other 12% people doing? Anyways, but this is a big shift because it's completely changed the narrative versus the traditional buy versus build, which has always been a cornerstone of any tech innovation inside of any big companies. So now, it's not just two choices. You have to decide when you're going to own, when you're going to rent, partner with someone, or if you're just going to wait. So on today's show, stick around and here's what you're going to learn. You're going to know why the 2023 Build or Buy question fundamentally broke in the 2026 economy. You're going to know the four AI stack layers you should own, rent, partner on, or delay. You're going to know how to make the right call on each layer without those expensive mistakes. And I'm going to lay out at the very end the three-week sprint plan to understand the Build, Buy, Partner, or Wait. All right. Welcome to Everyday AI and this is the Start Here series. This is your essential podcast series to both learn the AI basics and to double down on your knowledge. That's because after literally 750 plus episodes of Everyday AI, I never had a good answer when someone was like, I'm new here. Where do I start? Well, you start with the Start Here series. I think these are best if you go about them in order. So make sure you go to starthereseries.com and you can do exactly that. That's going to give you free access to our inner circle community. And then you can go click on the Start Here series space there and go listen, watch, read every single Start Here series episode in order, as well as a Spotify playlist that we keep updated there.