Build vs Buy vs Hybrid: What Changes When AI Writes the Code?

The build vs. buy debate isn't new — but the answer might be. I sat down with Zach Zalowitz from Fanatics and Laxman Mandayam from Nextuple for the Order Management Gurus panel to talk about what actually changes when AI starts writing the code.

Agentic AI and AI-generated code are rewriting the rules. When a developer can stand up a working microservice in a few days — or an AI agent can configure an integration that used to take weeks — the old decision frameworks crack. If AI can build it faster, do you still need to buy it? If you buy, are you really just assembling and configuring, with AI as the glue? And if you go hybrid, how do you keep it from becoming a maintenance nightmare down the road?

The Old Calculus Doesn't Hold

The classic build vs. buy decision was mostly about cost and speed: building takes a team and a quarter; buying gets you to market now. AI doesn't just shift those numbers — it changes what "build" even means. A capability that used to be a six-month project can now be stood up in days by a small team, or by an agent doing the integration work that used to consume a whole squad. That doesn't make every build a good idea. It makes the old shortcuts — "we always buy," "we always build" — indefensible.

Buying Is Getting Smarter, Not Easier

Buying still wins when the problem isn't your core competency, or when the vendor's roadmap compounds faster than your team can absorb the domain. But the bar for "why are we buying this" has gone up. If the answer is "because we don't have the people," AI has made that answer weaker. If the answer is "because the vendor owns the hard part of this domain," that's still a strong answer — and AI is making it stronger, because integration and configuration are exactly the parts AI is good at.

Hybrid Is a Maintenance Decision, Not an Architecture One

The honest conversation on the panel was about hybrid. Hybrid is where most enterprises end up — the question is whether it becomes a deliberate system or an accidental one. If you're going to build around a vendor platform, you need to own the seams: the custom integrations, the data contracts, the places where your AI-generated code touches their code. The teams that treat hybrid as a maintenance decision from day one — with owners, tests, and documentation — avoid the nightmare. The ones that treat it as "buy now, figure it out later" are the ones who end up with a platform they can't upgrade.

The discussion brought together practitioners who've made these calls in the real world — digging into what AI-native development is actually doing to the build vs. buy calculus for OMS, ERP, and enterprise apps. If you're making that call this year, it's worth a watch.

The Panel

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