Custom AI Solution Vs. Ready-Made: Choose Best

• By Amelia ava
• 26-04-2022
• Artificial Intelligence

A custom-tailored artificial intelligence software seems like the perfect solution that you need for your business, right? Custom AI solution adds value to your overall business, and since it is designed to solve specific challenges in your organization, a custom A.I solution becomes imperative for organizations in 2022.

However, there's another approach here that needs to be mentioned for A.I solution is the ready-made A.I solutions that are easy to implement and integrate into a business model.

Where custom A.I solutions require a considerable amount of budget, time, and talent to get developed, ready-made A.I solutions can be deployed instantly.

Plus, you'll start seeing results in a matter of months rather than waiting at least six months to 1 year to get a custom A.I solution was developed and then deployed to it gauge its effectiveness.

For the ready-made A.I solution, you can search for a vendor online, and if you want to develop a custom A.I solution, you can get in touch with a tech or mobile app development company to get started (more on this later).

So, amid the entire confusion, today, I'm going to solve this problem by differentiating between the two, Custom Vs. Ready-made A.I solutions.

As an entrepreneur, you'll be able to know which type of A.I solution is best for you and how you can select the best one for your organization after thoroughly understanding their advantages.

Let's get started.

Developing a custom A.I solution: The Pros & Cons
A core understanding of APIs, coding, designing, and development strategies are integral to the development of a custom A.I solution.
And not only this, if you're willing to get your own specific A.I solution, you should conduct a cost analysis to see how much investment would be necessary for developing a custom A.I based product.

Know that the cost of developing an A.I product also depends heavily upon the complexity, performance, and core purpose of the product that it'll serve.

In addition, my recommendation here would be to the property go through the pros of both the approaches and then determine which approach best fits you.

With that out of the way, let's get started discussing the pros of getting a custom A.I solution.

1. Speed to Market
The first benefit of getting an A.I solution from the market is the fact that you get to save a lot of time in building a custom A.I solution from scratch, and you experience speed to market.

Where building a digital A.I solution would cost you a considerable amount of time, let alone cost you a fortune; opting for a ready-made solution would enable you to buy a super-advanced solution that offers a bunch of other features for as low as $45 a month, which by the way is the actual cost of HubSpot's marketing hub.

In addition to that, A.I products may also require experts to maintain it and train the algorithm through data which is a whole different ball game.

In contrast, a ready-made solution would already be trained, and they would be ready to deploy – just like that.

2. Focused on the core necessity
A custom A.I solution is highly focused on the challenge that you're planning to mitigate. Hence, it has specific features and functionality that enable it to eliminate the roadblocks or challenges that you're facing in your organization.

The scope of features, the design, and even the experience are curated after thoroughly understanding your specific requirements and then coming up with a development plan to incorporate the problem-solving aspects to your A.I solution.

In addition to that, while creating your very own custom A.I solution enables you to get what you exactly want, a ready-made A.I tool would offer several features that you don't need, and you'll end up paying for them too for no reason.

3. The Competitive Advantage
Perhaps the easiest way to understand this point is by thinking of it in this way – how can you surpass your competitors if you're using the same technology that they are using.

And that's where building a custom-tailored digital product is the best solution.

When you opt for this approach, you automatically gauge the gaps in the market and start working on a cutting-edge product that surpasses the competition and excels in different aspects.

The same scenario goes for custom A.I solution development as well. By getting a ready-made A.I solution you buy the product that is already being used by your competitors.

However, with a custom product that is uniquely built and integrated with innovative features, you control the overall functionality of the solution while ensuring two aspects - #1, it will be a one-time investment, and #2, you'll be the only one using it.

4. The Ownership
When you'll get a custom A.I solution built for your company; you'll basically be the owner of it, which means that you'll have every right to it.

And as much as this option seems super obvious, I still wanted to stretch a little bit on this part because a third-party A.I solution may discontinue, and there's always a probability of losing critical data while using third-party software.

In contrast, when you get a custom A.I solution not only comes along with countless possibilities but also enables you to secure your data, ensure long-term usage, get the advantage of upgrading it whenever you want, and eventually, you can also sell the technology to companies and become a B2B entity in the market (in case you're not).

5. Seamless Integration
Custom artificial intelligence solutions are always the better choice when you're thinking of integrating them with the existing software that your organization is currently using.

With ready-to-use products, it's mostly hit, or miss – support for specific integrations can be missing or fail to cover the scope you require.

Again, this stems from the lack of control over the functionalities and the roadmap of the product.

Integration with further customized applications and developing dedicated visual interfaces might bring the most significant benefits for the business.

6. Beating The MRR Model
MRR, or monthly recurring revenue model, is the reason why millions of companies are earning billions today.  To explain it in the context of this blog, I would say that there's no need to pay subscription fees when you've got a custom-made A.I solution built for your business, period.

Buying a Ready-made A.I solution: The Pros & Cons
On the other hand, we've got ready-made A.I solutions that are ready to be deployed in an organization.

From a business standpoint, having a product like an AI solution based on TensorFlow or Cortana is super viable these days.

The future is all set to get revolutionized with A.I and the machine learning technology and most businesses have already realized this. Hence, they've leveraged such technologies to develop products for businesses.

Products such as Ahrefs, HubSpot Marketing, SEMRush, and MOZ are prime examples of B2B products that businesses use on a daily basis to compete with each other in the digital world.

But the above-mentioned examples were just to give you a glimpse of the viability of buying a ready-made A.I solution. So, let's start skimming through the pros and cons of getting a ready-made A.I solution and see how this approach works for you.

7. The Low Cost
As discussed earlier, the cost of buying a ready-made A.I software would significantly cost you less as compared to developing one from scratch.

Furthermore, the time you'll spend training and getting used to the new software that you've built would be way more compared to getting started with a ready-made one.

This is because, for the ready-made software, tutorials, training videos, hacks, and much more would be readily available for you to access as compared to getting used to the custom software.

8. Far Matured Capabilities
Matured capabilities of A.I solutions are highly dependent upon their usage and how much users are interacting with them.

The mechanism of machine learning is heavily based on constant interaction with humans and data feeding to improve its efficiency and performance.

That said, getting a custom A.I solution built would require manual data feeding and training. However, a ready-made software would've already passed this phase; hence, it would be a far better choice and capable compared to building one from scratch.

Furthermore, Ready-made A.I solutions are currently powering multinational enterprise-grade firms such as Tesla, BMW, and HP.

9. Set Management on Autopilot
There's no need to get a ready-made A.I software is maintained as it is up to the provider of the software to maintain it.

But how does this part differ from the custom A.I software solution because you'll end up paying in both scenarios, right?

Well, in custom A.I solution, you would have to hire software development experts to get your software maintained.
On the other hand, you'll be paying for a ready-made A.I solution on a monthly or annual basis, and the main difference that you'll notice in this model is the cost which would be significantly less as compared to getting a custom A.I solution was maintained.

Custom A.I Solution Vs. Ready-Made A.I Solution: Ending the Choice Paralysis
Deciding which one should you go for becomes super seamless once you've understood what the pros and cons of both of them are.
There are integral factors that need to be considered, and the most obvious ones have already been listed above for you to skim through.

What matters now is the way forward once you've planned after choosing which type of A.I solution you want to buy.

If you're going with the Custom A.I solution building approach, you need to find an iterative agile partner to develop your A.I solution.

You can quickly choose and validate a company by looking at its portfolio, reviews, and other critical stuff that coincides with the decision-making process.

If you're going for the ready-made A.I the solution buying approach, you need to research and streamline a list of companies offering ready-made solutions.

Once you're done, you can evaluate the effectiveness of the solutions being provided by these companies and select the best one as per your specific requirements.

To Conclude
My verdict is that there's no hack to getting the perfect A.I solution that specifically addresses whatever you're trying to achieve; hence, if you have the budget, you should go for the custom A.I solution development approach.

Secondly, you need to evaluate the multiple options available in the market when you're buying a ready-made A.I solution, the most imperative points to consider are already mentioned in this article for you to analyze before buying.

In the end, it usually boils down to the budget. If you need features, flexibility, scalability, and other integral aspects to be included in your solution, custom A.I is the best solution.

However, if you want to save thousands of dollars and get an abundance of features at your disposal, go for the ready-made A.I solution is the best option.