After 1,000+ hours building AI chatbots, here’s why you shouldn’t build your own

I’ve personally spent over 1,000 hours building AI chatbots. Here’s what I’ve learnt over the last 6 months, and why I think most businesses are wasting a huge amount of time and resources when they decide to “build their own” AI chatbots. “It’s never been easier to build an AI chatbot” — no doubt you’ll have heard this countless times in all those daily AI newsletters. You’ve probably been eyeing up LangChain AI and fancy deploying your own AI bot in a weekend hack. In fact, here’s exactly how you’d do it: 1. Fetch, transform, and ingest your data into a vector database 2. Spin up a chat interface from a template from Vercel 3. Connect to a super-intelligent AI model, like OpenAI's ChatGPT Simple right? Building your own AI chatbot gives you total control. - Control all data your chatbot has access to - Personalise branding & your own user experience - Ensure data privacy/security - Integrate with private systems & DBs But it’s not always 🌹 & 🌈... You'll also NEED: - Money, custom chatbots can cost $50k+ - AI expertise (it's not just a weekend project!) - AI model & provider selection requires research - Keeping up with AI advancements is a full-time job! - Data prep, automated testing & integrations = 😓 Consider this. Have you ever thought of building your own enterprise or website search? No, right? AI chat is even more intricate & specialised. Plus, wouldn't your time be better spent elsewhere than pre-processing 5,000+ PDFs? My takeaway 🥡 Build if you have internal AI expertise, very sensitive data, limited content, a dedicated team & you see AI chat as a core differentiator. Buy if AI is new, minimal expertise, your content is vast, you want integrations with Slack/Teams. — Either way. The single best thing you can do for your business is to start. Today. The average myaskai.com customer goes live with an AI chatbot in 10 mins! We've helped 30k+ businesses create their own personalized AI chatbots.