Build, buy, or wait — written down.

What this is

One engagement. One written outcome: build, buy, or wait.

It absorbs what used to be sold as separate shops — jurisdiction, vendor questions, readiness scores. Those are annexes to the decision. They are not five practices.

A board briefing is the session. This is the written stop that follows when the room still needs facts.

The decision

Build means a scoped system against one real workflow, in-country, owned by the institution. On this catalogue: Correspondence or Operations agents.

Buy means a vendor that survives residency, access, and exit. A region is not a jurisdiction. Keys, inference, and who can be compelled still matter.

Wait means a dated list of what would have to be true. The cheapest deliverable is the work that would fail if started now.

Nothing is built before this exists in writing. An institution that already knows what it wants can start at the build. One that is still deciding starts here.

Annexes — modules, not shops

Attached to the same decision. Commissioned as needed. Not a menu of consultancies.

Jurisdiction / residency

Where the work can legally run. Data, inference, training-exclusion, key custody — four cells, in writing. On-prem or air-gapped where classification requires it. This is the old sovereignty question, sold as part of the decision, not as a white paper.

Vendor questions

Where it runs. Who can see a record. What happens when the vendor leaves. Weights, prompts, logs, runbooks — or a hole. Written for the people who have to sign, before a procurement office is asked to.

Readiness scores

Not a maturity-model poster. Four scores, each with the evidence used: data, infrastructure, workforce, governance. Jurisdiction scoping sits inside this. A dated list of work that would fail if started now is a legitimate annex.

What you hold at the end

A document the signers can act on. Build, buy, or wait, with the annexes that were in scope. If the answer is build, the next object is a scoped system — not another study.

The people who write the audit are the people who would architect the build. There is no handover to a second firm to “do the AI.”

What this is not

• AI strategy as a retainer.
• AI governance as an operating-model sermon.
• Vendor diligence as its own shop.
• A readiness assessment as a poster for the wall.
• Five shops.

Those fragments are retired. They live here, as annexes, or they do not live.

How to start

Two sentences on the decision in front of you. Contact. If the signers have not been in a room yet, start with a board briefing.