Every company we work with has a build-vs-buy question they've been arguing about for two years. The argument tends to be theological. We try to make it empirical.
The rule we use: buy the surface, build the substance. Dashboards, CRMs, orchestration engines, vector databases — these are commodities. The market has decided what good looks like and it would take you years to catch up. Buy them.
Your models, your data definitions, the rules your business runs on — these are not commodities. They are the thing the dashboard is reporting on. Build those, own those, and treat them as proprietary IP. The dashboard is replaceable. The model is the moat.