build vs buyA Third Skipped a SaaS Buy. Now Price the Run Cost.
McKinsey's 2026 survey found 32% of organizations skipped a software purchase because agentic coding tools could build it in-house — while the share reporting any EBIT impact from AI stayed flat at 37%. The industry spread explains why: insurance and the public sector, at 19% and 17%, buy audit evidence and liability, not code.
August 31, 2026 · 11 min readAI acquisitions5 Acquisitions in 14 Days. The AI Agent Stack Is Being Bought.
In two weeks, Asana bought StackAI for $75M, Salesforce signed to acquire Contentful for $1–1.5B, Coupa acquired Rossum, Vertice acquired Vendr, and Palo Alto Networks closed the Portkey acquisition. Five deals across five different software categories targeting the same gap: the execution layer that lets AI agents do real work inside the enterprise. This article maps the emerging five-layer enterprise AI agent stack and provides two frameworks for CIOs deciding whether to build, buy, or partner.
June 9, 2026 · 16 min read