AI Is Horizontal: When to Buy, Build, or Blend (Free 6-Page Field Guide)
- Adam Pawliwec
- 4 days ago
- 1 min read
AI isn’t a niche trend—it’s a capability that cuts across every team and workflow. After speaking on an AI panel at Anges Québec’s AGM, I (Adam Pawliwec) came away with a simple decision framework: when to use an off-the-shelf AI tool (AI SaaS) or invest in an AI startup—and when it makes more sense to build a custom solution with a consulting/dev team.
To make this practical, I pulled everything into a concise 6-page field guide. It shows you how to shape an AI strategy around your data, your workflows, your compliance needs, and your distribution channels—so you keep control, reduce risk, and ship real results quarter after quarter.
Who it’s for
Leaders in mid-market and enterprise (ops, product, IT, data, finance), founders, and angel/VC investors who want outcomes—not demos.
What you’ll learn
Why AI is horizontal—and what that means for adoption
What to prioritize first: data rights, workflow fit, compliance, and distribution
Build vs. buy vs. blend—what to own vs. what to rent
LLM cost basics (prompt → retrieval → inference → post-processing) and how to lower cost per task
How to avoid vendor lock-in (model routing, portable prompts/indexes, owning your retrieval layer)
A simple adoption playbook (start small, measure KPI lift, add guardrails/HIL, scale safely)
An investor lens: four proofs of a real AI business (data, workflow, distribution, cost/quality evals)
Grab the field guide by clicking the link below to get the full breakdown and a few checklists you can use this quarter:
Comments