Organizations are eager to benefit from generative artificial intelligence. But in the rush to deploy AI to meet business goals, some companies jump in without fully weighing whether it’s best to buy an existing model, purchase a model and enhance it with their own data, or build a custom AI solution from scratch.

Each requires different capabilities, partnerships, and levels of customization, according to Nick van der Meulen, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. “Understanding your organization’s current strengths and weaknesses is essential because it informs the strategic choices that you make about how to acquire or develop your generative AI solutions,” van der Meulen said at MIT Sloan Management Review’s Work/25 conference last May.

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