Why I Refuse to Sell AI Platforms to My Clients

And what I do instead — a philosophy called BYOS

By Shishir Mishra, Founder & System Architect (AI) at KORIX

I have been shipping software for 19 years. AI systems, web platforms, mobile apps — across fintech, healthcare, renewable energy, and SaaS. 150+ projects. 24 countries. And in the last two years, I have watched the AI consulting industry develop a pattern that I think is fundamentally broken.

Here is the pattern:

A business decides it wants AI.

A consulting firm sells them a platform.

The business pays seat licenses, training fees, and a 6-month implementation timeline.

The platform requires change management, data migration, and a dedicated internal team to manage it.

By month 6, the project is over budget. By month 12, the renewal arrives and the business realises it cannot leave.

The "AI transformation" quietly stalls.

This is not a failure of AI. It is a failure of the delivery model.

The 74% problem

Gartner published a number in 2024 that should have been a wake-up call: 74% of enterprise AI pilots never reach production. Three out of four.

When I dug into why, the reasons were depressingly consistent:

Platform adoption cost. Training 200 people on a new tool costs more than the tool itself. Change management kills more AI projects than bad algorithms.

Data migration risk. Moving customer data into a vendor's system creates compliance exposure that cannot be undone. Every GDPR officer I have worked with has flagged this as the #1 risk they lose sleep over.

Vendor lock-in. The business does not own the AI. It rents it. When the renewal comes, the vendor knows the business cannot leave — so the price goes up. Every year. Forever.

None of these problems are about the AI. They are about the business model wrapped around the AI.

The question nobody was asking

In 2025, I started asking a different question:

What if the AI came to the software, instead of the software coming to the AI?

Every business already runs on software. Salesforce for sales. Microsoft 365 for collaboration. SAP for operations. HubSpot for marketing. Slack for communication. Or some combination of custom-built systems that have been running since 2004 and somehow still keep the business alive.

What if, instead of selling a new platform on top of all that, we built the AI inside the systems the team already uses?

No new login. No new training. No data migration. No seat licenses. No vendor lock-in.

That question became a philosophy. I call it BYOS — Bring Your Own Software.

What BYOS looks like in practice

BYOS is not a framework, a library, or a product. It is a delivery model.

When a business comes to KORIX with an AI problem, we do not pitch a platform. We ask: what software does your team live in every day? Then we build the AI agent inside that software.

Here is a concrete example. A renewable energy company in the UK needed to score inbound leads faster. Their sales team was losing deals because quotes took 48 hours to turn around. A traditional approach would have been: buy a lead scoring platform, integrate it with their CRM, train the team, migrate historical data, and hope it works.

What we actually did: we built a lead scoring agent inside their existing Salesforce instance. The agent reads new leads as they arrive, enriches them from public data sources, scores them against the company's ideal customer profile, applies MCS compliance checks automatically, and routes the qualified ones to the right sales rep — with a plain-English explanation of why each lead scored the way it did.

Total deployment time: 21 days. Total new software purchased: zero. Total training required: zero — the sales team just sees better-qualified leads appearing in the CRM they already use every day.

The result: 3.2x conversion lift. Zero compliance violations. And the company owns the source code, the trained models, and the documentation. If KORIX disappeared tomorrow, the agent would keep running.

The delivery model: 21 days, fixed fee, you own everything

Every BYOS engagement at KORIX follows the same structure:

Days 1-3: Discovery. We pick the most painful workflow with a clear input, a clear output, and a measurable outcome. We scope the agent and write a one-page brief.

Days 4-18: Build. We build the agent inside the client's existing stack. Governance — confidence thresholds, audit trails, rollback policies — is built in from day one, not bolted on later. The client sees daily progress.

Days 19-21: Handover. We transfer the source code, train the internal team, and step back. On Day 22, the client's team operates the agent independently.

The fee is fixed — typically $15,000 to $40,000 depending on complexity. Payment is split 50/50: half at kick-off, half at handover. And here is the part that makes traditional consultancies uncomfortable: if the agent is not in production by Day 21, the client does not pay the second milestone.

No fine print. No "well actually." No sunk cost.

Why I ate my own dog food

Last week, I built seven AI agents for KORIX itself using the same BYOS approach. Not for a client — for my own business.

• A GSC Health Agent that monitors Google Search Console daily and alerts on coverage drops.
• A PageSpeed Agent that tests five key pages every morning for Core Web Vitals regressions.
• A Sitemap Audit Agent that validates sitemap structure daily.
• A Backup Verifier that confirms backups ran and escalates if any are stale.
• An IndexNow Agent that pushes new content to Bing weekly.
• An Auto-Index Agent that submits to Google on every publish.
• A Lead Monitor that alerts me if any inbound lead sits unprocessed for more than two hours.

Total time: six days. Total new software purchased: zero. Each agent runs inside systems I already use.

If I can build this for myself in less than a week, imagine what I can build for a business with a real budget and a real problem in 21 days.

The objection I hear most

"But if you do not sell a platform, how do you make recurring revenue?"

I do not. And that is the point.

KORIX sells craftsmanship, not subscriptions. The client pays once for a working agent and owns everything afterward. If they want a second agent or a third agent later, that is a separate engagement. We would rather earn the next project than rent the first one.

This makes KORIX structurally different from most AI consulting firms. We have no incentive to make the engagement longer, more complex, or more dependent on us. Our incentive is the opposite: ship fast, hand over cleanly, and earn the next referral.

Who BYOS is for

BYOS is not for everyone. If you are building a consumer AI product from scratch, you probably need a platform. If you need a chatbot on your website, there are good off-the-shelf tools for that.

BYOS is for businesses that:

• Have already invested in a software stack and do not want to rip it out.
• Have been burned by a previous "AI transformation" that never reached production.
• Operate in regulated industries where data residency and auditability are non-negotiable.
• Want to own the AI, not rent it.

If you have ever said "we already have too many tools," BYOS was built for you.

The AI consulting industry will change

I believe the platform-first model has about 18-24 months left as the default. The economics do not work for the buyer, and buyers are getting smarter. The next generation of AI consulting will look more like BYOS: custom agents built inside existing systems, fixed-fee engagements, full ownership transfer.

KORIX is not the only company that will figure this out. But we are one of the first to name it, build a methodology around it, and ship it in production.

If you want to see the full philosophy, it is at korixinc.com/byos. If you want to see the agents we build, it is at korixinc.com/agents. And if you want to try it, book a free 30-minute Fit Check — we will tell you honestly whether an agent solves your problem, or whether it does not.

Shishir Mishra is the founder & System Architect(AI) at KORIX, a systems-first AI adoption agency based in Ahmedabad, India. He has spent 19 years shipping production software across 24 countries. Every KORIX pilot is led personally by Shishir, from kick-off to handover.