Build, buy, compose or wait: living with the technology stack you chose

Choosing between building, buying, composing or waiting is only the first decision. This session looks at how practitioners manage integration debt, ownership and the cost of changing course once the stack is chosen.

April 21, 2027
11.20 - 12.00
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Central London, UK
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Spring 2027 Meeting

Discussion Points

Once AI is handling part of the planning cycle, the question shifts from which tools to buy to who decides what. Roles, decision rights and partner arrangements built for a human-only process rarely fit, and the operating model either changes deliberately or changes by default. This session examines the strategic context that should sit upstream of any further capability investment.

  • How to tell whether performance constraints reflect capability gaps, operating model limitations or partner ecosystem constraints that further capability investment will not resolve
  • What changes in roles, decision rights and escalation paths when parts of planning are automated, and who is accountable when an automated decision goes wrong
  • How 3PL and 4PL relationships need to change when AI-enabled transformation depends on shared data access and shared investment, and why transactional contract structures often get in the way
  • How the move from monolithic platforms to best-of-breed and AI-enabled components changes who owns integration and how technology partners are evaluated
  • How sustained volatility changes what a resilient operating model needs to look like, and how to set the right level of ambition given partner and investment constraints