At the technology summit hosted by the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Lehr, General Partner at Work-Bench, engaged in a dialogue with Tom Loftus, Deputy Editor of the WSJ Leadership Institute, and Marina F. Bellini, an executive at Mars. Good morning.

The arrival of artificial intelligence has introduced a new set of questions: which tasks should marketing teams handle internally, and which should continue to be outsourced to external providers such as advertising agencies and data service vendors? During the second day of the Leadership Institute's technology summit, several speakers indicated that a company's choice hinges on its own core strengths.

"If I had to summarize the current state of buying versus building in the market, it would be this: buy for the operational baseline, build for differentiation," said Jonathan Lehr, co-founder and General Partner at New York-based venture firm Work-Bench. "There is a wealth of mature, off-the-shelf software on the market that can meet 80% to 90% of business needs," he added. However, internal IT teams must still invest effort in the "last mile" of work, such as identifying and integrating the necessary data sources and evaluating the actual performance of the systems in operation.

Regarding the "SaaS doomsday" narrative—the view that software-as-a-service providers will be disrupted by customers and startups wielding powerful AI capabilities—Lehr believes the situation is equally divided. He stated that startups attempting to completely replace CRM systems "will face difficulties," but noted that "there are indeed many new capabilities emerging in the sales and marketing space today."

Lehr shared that Work-Bench has invested in a company called Petra Labs, which is "rethinking AI engine optimization." "Saying 'rethinking' might sound like a stretch, given that this sector is only a year old. But their solution can embed deeply within an enterprise, mining and integrating data stored in Snowflake, Databricks, and other systems to support marketing attribution analysis. This is a new capability that hasn't been solved before."

This new "build versus buy" trade-off ultimately depends on each company's own priorities. "Some companies will prioritize security and choose to build in-house; others will focus more on marketing operations," Lehr concluded.