Commercial model
Shareable reference
Buy commodity models. Build proprietary data, workflow, and control. Name the operator after month three.
Share: https://meridian.keyteller.com/use-cases/make-or-buy-the-missing-capability
A practical example
A corporate product director and CFO score one capability on three axes: is it the edge, do we have production engineers who will own it, is the vendor market mature. They price 24-month cost with seven lines: build, evals, re-eval on upgrades, observability, inference, maintenance, recruiting. Operations consume most of three-year cost. If you cannot name the operator after month three, you did not buy a system. You rented a demo.
What you leave with. Make, buy, or partner, with the clock and the person who runs it after week 12.
Not this. A we-should-own-our-stack slogan or a bake-off scored on demo quality. Calendar for this class of work is measured in weeks, not hours.
Related situations