TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY
This means the labour saved on coding is often displaced onto engineering teams which end up building APIs to make these so-called easy solutions talk to one another.
The modern strategy is one that requires a realisation that you are never just buying a tool, you are buying into a vendor’ s roadmap, update cycle and definition of how your business should work.
Does this mean the‘ build’ option is on the up? This used to be a method synonymous with risk thanks to the threat of bloated budgets and missed deadlines. But, with Gen AI now widely adopted across this area, it – along with low-code platforms – is fundamentally altering the economics of custom development.
With AI coding assistants capable of generating boilerplate code and testing scripts in seconds, the barrier to entry for building proprietary tools is significantly lower than it used to be.
It means that internal teams can now spin up microservices or custom interfaces in weeks rather than months. There is a catch, though – this speed brings a new danger: being just because you can build it, does not mean you should.
The maintenance burden of custom code remains and, without strict governance, shadow IT can explode, leaving an organisation with a patchwork of unmaintainable applications. This leads to the ultimate question: how does one choose?
104 March 2026