Welcome to Episode 3 of The AI Value Track — our brand-new podcast series helping you cut through the AI noise and actually use it in your business.

In this final episode of the series, Simon sits down with Ed Hogg (CEO, SolvedBy.AI) and James Bolle (Head of Data & Insights, ReThink Productivity) to tackle one of the biggest strategic questions leaders face:

👉 Should you build your own AI tools, or buy them off the shelf?

We keep it simple and explore:

• Build vs buy decisions tied to strategy and IP
• When generic problems justify off‑the‑shelf tools
• Niche bottlenecks and owning differentiated capability
• Real costs of talent, data architecture and compute
• Governance, scope control and reliability expectations
• Data quality, sourcing and security by design
• Measurable pilots, baselines and explainability
• EBITDA impact, inference costs and ROI discipline
• Ethics beyond bias, oversight and customer impact
• Partner contracts, IP protection and reuse limits
• Scaling blockers across finance, compliance, HR and IT
• Regulations to watch including EU AI Act and GDPR

If you’re thinking about making AI a real part of your business — not just a buzzword — this episode will help you make smarter, lower-risk decisions.

Tune in and learn how to get your AI projects off the ground — and keep them moving.

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