LinkedIn·Sunday, 16 August 2026·10d ago

AI did not make building easy. It made starting something way easier. There is a difference, and anyone who lived through Microsoft Access…

Geoffrey Smolders

Activating DATA+AI.

AI did not make building easy. It made starting something way easier. There is a difference, and anyone who lived through Microsoft Access already knows it. Access democratised app-building. Every department shipped its own. Then those files quietly became the payroll system, the compliance tracker, the thing the warehouse actually ran on. No owner. No backups. No auth. A decade of cleanup. And then those persons left and no clear maintenance plan was in place. The tools changed. The pattern did not. Research found AI-built apps routinely ship with authentication logic in the browser, API keys in client-side code, and internal tools published with no login. A separate scan found roughly 5,000 of them leaking corporate data. Biztory's rules are simple: If it holds your customers, your money, or your regulated data, buy it. If it is a workflow nobody sells you and a spreadsheet is currently doing the job, build it. Today. Headless is also an immediate build. The mistake is not building with AI. The mistake is letting a weekend build become a system of record without anyone deciding it should. What have you built that quietly became critical? #DataStrategy #AI #BuildVsBuy