There Are Only Five Moves

Every AI request that lands on your desk feels like its own special problem. It is not. Strip away the framing and there are only five things you can do with any of them.

Self-serve it. Buy it. Build it. Redesign around it. Or do nothing. That is the whole menu. Most of the discipline is not deciding whether to act. It is routing each request to the right one of the five, on purpose, instead of defaulting to whichever move your culture reaches for by reflex.

The order matters, because the cheapest honest answer is usually near the top. Can people already do this with tools you have? Self-serve it, with training and guardrails, not a project. Is the real fix a different workflow rather than a tool? Redesign it, because speeding up a broken workflow just gets you to the wrong place sooner. Is there a strong vendor for a capability the whole market shares? Buy it, and do not rebuild a commodity out of pride. Is it genuinely yours, on your data and your workflow? Then build it. And if the value is thin or the problem is not real, do nothing, and protect your attention and your credibility.

Most requests never reach build. That is the point. Build is the last stop, not the first reflex, and routing on purpose is what keeps a company from pouring its scarce engineering into the wrong four moves out of five.

The failure is rarely choosing wrong. It is not choosing at all: letting every request default to a pilot, or a purchase, or a custom build, because that is what the room always does. Say the five out loud, for each request, in front of the people who own the work.

What is the loudest AI request in your queue right now? Route it out loud through the five, in order, in front of the person who owns it. Notice how far down the list the honest answer sits. It is rarely where you started. The full discipline is on Buy the Record. Build the Intelligence.

Cheers,
-Titus