While homegrown AI seems appealing in theory, the reality is months of development, ongoing maintenance, and a solution that lacks sales domain expertise. Ava delivers enterprise-grade sales intelligence out of the box—so your team can focus on what actually differentiates your business.
Here's what teams building homegrown solutions quickly discover:
Your team will spend months building infrastructure, fine-tuning models, and iterating on features before your first rep gets any value. That's 6-12 months of engineering time, data science resources, and opportunity cost—while your competitors are already selling smarter with purpose-built tools. Ava works on day one. The time your team saves not building AI infrastructure is time spent building your actual product.
Even with OpenAI or Anthropic APIs, you're starting with general-purpose models that don't understand B2B sales. Teaching an LLM about MEDDIC, stakeholder dynamics, value engineering, competitive positioning, and deal strategy requires massive amounts of training data you probably don't have and domain expertise your engineering team isn't hired to provide. Ava is built on a proprietary Sales Reasoning Model trained specifically for B2B sales. We've already done the work of encoding sales expertise into the AI—you don't have to.
Building is just the beginning. Every API update, every model improvement, every new feature requires ongoing engineering resources. Your custom solution becomes legacy code the moment you deploy it, while your team gets pulled into maintenance instead of innovation. Ava is continuously improved by a dedicated team. New capabilities, model improvements, and feature enhancements are delivered to you automatically—no engineering sprints required.
Ava delivers enterprise-grade sales intelligence without the engineering overhead. Built on a Sales Reasoning Model and ready to work immediately.
Ava isn't a general-purpose chatbot wrapped in a sales UI. She's built on a proprietary Sales Reasoning Model that understands deal context, stakeholder dynamics, competitive positioning, objection handling, and value articulation. This isn't something you can prompt engineer in a weekend—it's years of sales expertise encoded into an AI architecture specifically designed for B2B selling. Your engineering team can focus on your core product instead of becoming sales AI experts.
No infrastructure to build. No models to train. No data pipelines to architect. Ava integrates with your existing systems (Salesforce, calendar, email, meeting tools) and starts delivering value immediately. While your team would still be in the design phase, your reps are already saving 6-8 hours per week. That's real ROI, not a roadmap promise.
Ava gets better every week—new capabilities, improved accuracy, enhanced integrations—without consuming any of your engineering resources. Building is expensive. Maintaining is more expensive. With Ava, you get continuous innovation without the technical debt. Your team never has to choose between improving your AI sales tool and building features your customers actually pay for.
The build vs. buy decision for sales AI isn't close.
Here's what most teams don't account for when considering DIY sales AI:
Building sales AI requires two types of expertise most teams don't have: (1) AI/ML engineering for production systems, and (2) deep B2B sales domain knowledge. Finding people with both? Nearly impossible. You'll either build technically impressive AI that doesn't understand sales, or sales-aware tools that don't leverage AI effectively. Ava's team has both—and we've spent years getting it right.
Industry data shows that for every dollar spent building custom software, you'll spend $3-5 maintaining it over its lifetime. AI systems are worse—models need retraining, prompts need updating, integrations break, APIs change, and costs creep up. Your custom solution is legacy code the day you launch it. With Ava, maintenance is our problem, not yours.
Every engineering hour spent building sales AI is an hour not spent on your actual product. Your competitors aren't building their own CRM, their own video conferencing, or their own email clients—so why build your own sales AI? Unless sales AI is your product, it's not your differentiator. Use Ava and focus your team on what makes your business unique.
Most AI Projects Fail: Studies show that 80-85% of AI/ML projects never make it to production. The ones that do often deliver underwhelming results. Why? Lack of domain expertise, insufficient training data, poor product decisions, scope creep, and underestimated complexity. Ava is production-proven with paying customers saving 6-8 hours per week. You're betting on a sure thing, not a science project.
To be fair, there are rare cases where building custom sales AI could be justified:
✓ If you are a sales AI company and this is your core product—then yes, obviously build it yourself.
✓ If you have truly unique requirements that no vendor can address and you've validated this with multiple sales AI providers—and you have the budget for a multi-year investment—then custom might be worth exploring.
✓ If you have an exceptional AI team that's currently underutilized and sales productivity is your #1 business constraint—and you can afford the opportunity cost—it might make sense.
For everyone else? Buy Ava. The ROI is obvious, the time to value is immediate, and your team can focus on your actual competitive advantage.
Smart engineering teams choose Ava because they understand:
In the 6-12 months it would take to build a custom solution, your reps could have already saved hundreds of hours with Ava. That's real revenue impact, not a roadmap promise.
B2B sales is complex. Building AI that truly understands stakeholder dynamics, value engineering, competitive positioning, and deal strategy requires years of expertise you probably don't have in-house.
Your engineering team's time is your most valuable resource. Spending it on building commodity infrastructure instead of your core product is a strategic mistake.
One of the things that's been incredible with Ava has been our capacity to actually automate win reviews and create an artifact with all the detail to our questions, but it's backed actually by referenceable customer quotes, at that level of detail. We've just been able to take that game to another level.
It has been remarkable to see Ava accomplish what we never would have thought possible in primarily intellectual space of sales. I love that we can treat her like a new hire, train her easily and then her capability is then immediately scalable to an infinite number of sales opportunities.
Ava was easy to set up, effortless to train, and was able to immediately make sense of our existing brand guidelines, product knowledge, and strategic/competitive narrative. Integration with Salesforce, Gong, and GSuite was a matter of minutes.
You can spend 6-12 months and $300K+ building a custom sales AI solution that will require ongoing maintenance forever—or you can start saving your reps 6-8 hours per week today.
The build vs. buy decision for sales AI isn't close.
Unless you're a sales AI company, building custom is a distraction from your core business. Your engineering team is talented enough to build anything—but the question is: Should they?
Ava delivers enterprise-grade sales intelligence built on a proprietary Sales Reasoning Model, ready to work on day one, continuously improved, with zero maintenance burden.
Your team should build products that differentiate your business. Let us handle sales AI.
Ready to see why smart teams choose Ava over building?
