The 'Build vs. Buy' Fallacy in the AI Era
There is a gold rush of "AI Apps" flooding the market. Most are thin wrappers around a single API. Relying on them for core business functions is a dangerous game.
The Fragility of Wrappers
If your AI strategy consists of subscribing to five different SaaS tools that all call the same model under the hood, you have no moat. You have no differentiation.
And worse—you are exposed to platform risk. If the underlying model changes, or the SaaS vendor pivots, your entire workflow breaks overnight.
Owning the Cognitive Layer
The alternative is to treat LLMs as a commodity component—like a CPU—and build your own cognitive layer on top.
By controlling the context window, the RAG pipeline, and the prompt engineering, you retain control over the most important part: your business logic.
This doesn't mean training your own foundational model—that's a fool's errand for most companies. It means owning the orchestration. Your business logic lives in your code, not in someone else's prompt template.