Build vs buy is dead — AI just killed it

Picture this: You're sitting in a conference room, halfway through a vendor pitch. The demo looks solid, and pricing fits nicely under budget. The timeline seems reasonable too. Everyone’s nodding along.You’re literally minutes away from saying yes.Then someone from your finance team walks in. They see the deck and frown. A few minutes later, they shoot you a message on Slack: “Actually, I threw together a version of this last week. Took me 2 hours in Cursor. Wanna take a look?”Wait… what?This person doesn't code. You know for a fact they've never written a line of JavaScript in their entire life. But here they are, showing you a working prototype on their laptop that does… pretty much exactly what the vendor pitched. Sure, it's got some rough edges, but it works. And it didn’t cost six figures. Just two hours of their time.Suddenly, the assumptions you walked in with — about how software is developed, who makes it and how decisions are made around it — all start