Grounding, not models, will define your AI advantage

Over the past two years, working inside the enterprise AI infrastructure world, tracking where the industry is heading, I have noticed the same question surface repeatedly: should we build our own large language model? The model feels like the thing, the engine, the brain, the asset worth owning. But after significant years as a product manager in the AI world in both customer experience and grounding infrastructure I concluded that it tends to unsettle the room: the m