MARTECH FOR SMEs – PART FIVE: Build, buy, or train?

Posted by Mike O'Brien on March 18, 2026 in Postcards from the digital frontier | Leave a comment

Build, buy, or train? how SMEs should close the martech skills gap

You know you need to develop AI-ready marketing capability. The question is how. There are four options available to most organisations. For SMEs, only one of them consistently works.

The previous piece in this series defined what an AI-ready marketing team looks like – the characteristics, the skills, the structural shifts. If you read it and found yourself thinking “yes, but how do we actually get there?” – that is the right question, and this piece answers it.

There are four ways an organisation can close a capability gap. Understanding all four and being honest about which ones are realistic for an SME, is more useful than jumping straight to a solution.

Option one: Build

Building means hiring for the capability you need. You identify the skills gap, write a job description, and recruit someone – or several people – who bring AI-ready marketing capability with them.

The appeal is obvious. You own the capability. It compounds inside your organisation. There is no ongoing dependency on an external supplier.

The reality for most SMEs is harder. Hiring AI-capable marketers is competitive and expensive. The skills you are hiring for today may not be the skills you need in eighteen months, because the tools are evolving that fast. And new hires bring their own approaches, which may or may not integrate with your existing team and stack.

Building is the right answer for organisations with the scale to absorb the cost, the time to wait for the right hire, and the management bandwidth to onboard effectively. For most SMEs, that is a significant set of conditions to meet simultaneously.

Option two: Buy

Buying means outsourcing the capability to an agency, consultant, or specialist supplier. You contract for the output – content, campaigns, analytics, automation – and the AI-readiness sits with the supplier, not with you.

This is the fastest option and the most familiar one. And for specific, well-defined tasks it remains entirely sensible. If you need a campaign turned around quickly, buying the capability makes sense.

The problem is what it does not do. Buying AI capability does not build it. The knowledge stays outside your organisation. The moment you stop paying, the capability leaves. And if your supplier is doing the AI thinking for you, your team never develops the judgment to evaluate, direct, or improve it.

Buying has its place. As a strategy for closing a capability gap, it simply defers the problem rather than solving it.

Option three: Embed

The embed model is less well-known but increasingly common at enterprise scale. Rather than delivering work as a supplier, a partner embeds within the client’s team – designing workflows, transferring capability, and in some cases transitioning their people and processes directly into the client’s in-house function over time.

This is a powerful model. At its best, it closes the capability gap and leaves the organisation genuinely stronger – because the partner has literally built the operating structure and trained the people to run it.

The economics, however, are not built for SMEs. Embedded partnerships at this depth require significant investment of both money and management attention. They work for organisations with the budget to sustain a close partner relationship over an extended period and the infrastructure to absorb what the partner is building. For most SMEs, embed is an inspiring model to understand – and an impractical one to pursue directly.

Option four: Train

Training means developing the capability in the people you already have. It is slower than buying, less immediately visible than hiring, and less dramatic than embedding a specialist partner. It is also, for most SMEs, the option that works.

The case for training rests on three things.

First, your existing team already has the domain knowledge – the understanding of your market, your customers, your brand, your ways of working – that no external hire or supplier can replicate quickly. AI capability built on that foundation is more immediately useful than AI capability brought in from outside.

Second, training is the only option that builds durable internal capability. The knowledge stays in the business. It compounds. Each team member who develops genuine AI-ready skills makes the next development step easier.

Third, done well, training develops the judgment that all the other options assume you already have. To hire effectively for AI-ready skills, you need to know what good looks like. To manage a supplier’s AI outputs, you need to evaluate them. To direct an embedded partner, you need strategic clarity about where AI should and should not sit in your operation. Training builds the foundation that makes all other options more effective – even if you eventually pursue them.

What good training actually looks like

Most marketing training gets this wrong. It focuses on tools – how to use ChatGPT, how to set up an AI workflow in HubSpot, how to use Canva’s AI features – without addressing the underlying capability that determines whether those tools get used well.

Tool training produces tool users. What SMEs need are marketers with judgment: people who can direct AI, evaluate its outputs, design workflows that integrate it systematically, and continue learning as the tools evolve.

The distinction matters enormously in practice. A marketer who has been trained on a specific AI tool will use that tool until it is superseded. A marketer who has developed genuine AI capability will adapt to whatever comes next – because the underlying skills (directional, operational, adaptive, to use the framework from the previous piece) transfer across tools.

Good training for SME marketing teams shares a set of characteristics. It is grounded in real workflows, not hypothetical examples. It builds prompting and evaluation skills alongside tool knowledge. It involves the whole team, not just one designated “AI person.” And it is ongoing – not a one-off session that counts as done.

The honest starting point

Most SME marketing teams will need a combination of options over time. Training to build the foundation. Selective buying for specialist tasks that fall outside internal capability. Possibly hiring as the team grows and the capability requirement deepens.

But the sequencing matters. Trying to buy or hire your way to AI readiness before your team has the foundational capability to direct and evaluate what you are buying is an expensive way to remain dependent.

Train first. Build the judgment. Then make the other decisions from a position of genuine capability rather than gap-filling.

Jam Partnership works with SME marketing teams and their leaders on building genuine AI-ready marketing capability – through training, consultancy, and practical frameworks developed from twenty-five years of working with ambitious businesses.

Part 1: Martech for SMEs Part ONE: What Martech Stack Does a Small Business Actually Need?

Part 2: MARTECH FOR SME’s PART TWO: You’ve built your core martech stack. what comes next?

Part 3: MARTECH FOR SMEs – PART THREE: Using AI tools is not the same as being AI-ready.

Part 4: Martech for SMEs – Part Four: What does an AI-ready marketing Team actually look like