There’s an old saying: what goes around comes around
And in technology, that feels truer now than ever
When I started out in the IT industry, software wasn’t everywhere. The idea of an independent “software house” was still relatively new, and many organisations simply built their own systems in-house
A big part of our sales pitch back then was buy versus build
If the government changed tax rules, why would every company hire its own tax expert and rewrite its own code?
Far better to let a software house employ one expert, update the software once, and roll it out to thousands of customers
Efficiency, scale, common sense
Fast forward to today and apps are omnipresent
There’s software for everything
Many of these tools sit far away from regulation or legislative change, and buying software has become the default response to almost any business problem
Which is why a recent VentureBeat article made me stop and think
It described a scenario where a company is just about to sign off on a new Martech purchase… when the CFO walks into the room and says:
“I’ve just built that in ChatGPT.”
That moment feels like a pivot point
Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But it will come to pass
One of my own team is already writing code that writes AI prompts, just to automate everyday tasks
Not complex edge cases
Just the stuff we all do day in, day out
And that’s the shift
We’re moving back towards a world where building, adapting and tailoring solutions is becoming easier than buying off-the-shelf tools
Except this time, you don’t need a full IT department or months of development
You need clarity, context, and the ability to work with AI
Conclusion
The world of business is changing fast, again
We once moved from building everything ourselves to buying everything off the shelf
Now the pendulum is swinging back, powered by AI
The question isn’t whether this will happen, but how quickly organisations will recognise it, and adapt
What goes around really does come around
Just this time, it’s happening at machine speed
For decades, every growing company asked the same question: Should we build this ourselves, or should we buy it? And, for decades, the answer was pretty straightforward: Build if it's core to your business; buy if it isn’t. The logic made sense, because building was expensive and meant borrowing time from overworked engineers, writing specs, planning sprints, managing infrastructure and bracing yourself for a long tail of maintenance. Buying was faster. Safer. You paid for the support and the peace of mind. But something fundamental has changed: AI has made building accessible to everyone. What used to take weeks now takes hours, and what used to require fluency in a programming language now requires fluency in plain English. When the cost and complexity of building collapse this dramatically, the old framework goes down with them. It’s not build versus buy
unknownx500
