Before you build your own AI tool, ask yourself these three things

Almost anyone technical enough can build an AI tool. It's whether anyone's actually signed up to own it well past the six months where it's still fun and new, for as long as the tool exists.

Three questions worth sitting with before you start:

1. Is this actually unique to your shop? If it's tied to your own client relationships or how you deliver service, that's worth owning. Security scaffolding and basic delivery infrastructure aren't differentiation just because you built them. No client picks you because you have artisanal audit logging.
2. Can it be maintained forever, not for six months? Models get deprecated. Prompts drift. Someone has to notice when it breaks, usually at 2am, and that someone is you.
3. Is there a real plan for security and compliance? Not "we'll figure it out" once it touches client data. A real answer, before it goes live.

The build is always the cheap, fun part. The maintenance is the actual cost, and it compounds. Run the math out five years and a lot of "we can build that ourselves" decisions look very different.

We get into the actual cost math, and a partner's real build-vs-buy story, in the full webinar: https://youtu.be/FmkIn9ilGJs