A third of companies just cancelled software purchases because they think they can build it
McKinsey's State of AI 2026, reported on 1st Sept’26, found that 32% of organisations have decided against buying an off-the-shelf software product or feature because they could build it themselves with agentic coding tools. It runs to 41% in tech, 39% in healthcare payers and providers, and to nearly half among the small group McKinsey calls high performers. Large enterprises scaling agents in at least one function rose from 27% to 40% in a year. Sitting in the same reporting: MIT NANDA's finding that internally built systems succeed about a third of the time, against roughly two thirds for bought ones.
What it actually means
The build side of build-versus-buy just got dramatically cheaper to start. Writing the thing was never the expensive part, it was running it, securing it, fixing it at 2am. Keeping it alive after the person who built it leaves is the expensive part, and a coding agent doesn't touch any of that. So a third of companies have swapped a licence fee, which is visible and predictable, for a maintenance liability, which is neither. If you're making this call: the honest test isn't "can we build this?" with an agent, the answer is usually yes. It's "are we willing to own this for five years?" Build the things that are actually yours, the ones carrying your logic and your data, where owning it is the point. Buy the boring plumbing. And whatever you build, price the run cost on day one, in the business case, next to the saved licence fee, because that is the number the 33% got wrong.
A coding agent makes building cheap. It does nothing about owning.
32%organisations that skipped a software purchase to build it with AI instead
Source: McKinsey State of AI 2026, via Forkast/Yahoo Finance · Wednesday 2 September 2026