Build vs buy: should you build your own AI shopping assistant?
Overview Today, an AI shopping assistant can be built in a few days. This article explains when that approach makes sense, and how to compare a solution developed in-house (build) with an external solution from a specialist (buy). Since the start of 2026, one question comes up in almost every conversation I have with retailers: "couldn't we just build this AI shopping assistant ourselves?" It often comes from an IT team that has seen a Google demo, or simply from someone on staff who plugged a general-purpose AI model into the product catalog over a weekend with Claude Code or Codex. It's a fair question, and I'm not neutral here: I lead the marketing team at iAdvize, which has been building its own AI Shopping Assistant for several years now. But I've watched this scenario play out several times in software over the past 2 decades, and in e-commerce in particular. So I think it's worth telling you how the story usually ends.
