An honest comparison
Usually the right long-term answer. Often the wrong first move.
If AI is going to be core to your product, you will want your own team eventually. The question is what you do about the first system, before that team exists and while you are still learning what to hire for.
Engineers on your payroll, accumulating context about your data, your domain and your systems every day. Complete control over priorities. The costs are recruitment time, salary and the risk of hiring for a problem you have not fully scoped yet.
One senior pod ships the first system against a specific metric and hands it over. That gives your future hires something concrete to own rather than a blank page, and gives you a much clearer picture of what to hire for.
The real question is rarely build or buy. It is what happens in the twelve months before an in-house team exists, and whether your first ML hire inherits a running system or a blank repository.
8 weeks
Typical engagement, first scoping call to handover.
One senior pod, scoped to a single metric and priced against it, ending in a running system with its evaluation harness and the documentation your team needs to own it.
An in-house engineer learns your data, your edge cases and your politics continuously. No external team ever catches up to that, and we would not claim otherwise.
Priorities shift without a new statement of work. For fast-moving product work that responsiveness is worth a great deal.
If AI is genuinely core to your product, owning the capability is correct. The only question is sequencing.
What you give up
Months of search before any code is written, in one of the most competitive hiring markets there is.
Job specs written before the first system exists tend to describe the wrong role. It is easier to hire well once something is running.
One ML engineer with no senior peer and no existing system is a difficult first year, and a common reason early hires leave.
The engagement starts at scoping rather than at a job posting.
A running system with an evaluation harness and documentation is a far better first day than a blank repository.
After the first system exists, the role you need is a much more specific and answerable question.
What you give up
The engagement is built to end in a handover. If you need permanent, always-on capability, hiring is the answer and we are not.
We learn it well enough to ship and document. An employee accumulates far more over years.
Work scoped to one metric assumes the metric holds. If priorities genuinely change weekly, an in-house team absorbs that better.
A direct conversation about the problem, the metric, and whether we are the right shape for it. If another option on this page fits you better, we will say so.
