# Why enterprise AI is shifting from rent to own > Source: > Published: 2026-08-11 13:00:00+00:00 As intelligence becomes your organization's most valuable asset, the question is whether it makes sense to rent it from another company. Oumi, a startup run by a former leader on the Google Gemini team, has launched tech that lets you build and own your AI models, deploy them within hours, and use agentic AI to keep them updated and compound their value over time. On Tuesday, Oumi released new capabilities that let enterprises deploy specialized AI models, continuously improve them using production data, and manage the full lifecycle of your models from one console. - With a single click, enterprises can now deploy their own custom models with production inference that can automatically scale to only use the GPU power they require, saving money and energy - Organizations can now automatically retrain their custom models using live production data captured from the internal environment - A publicly accessible CLI can now be operated by agents and provides developers with full access to training, evaluation, and workflows One way to think about this is that the appeal of open models for enterprises is that you can download them and then customize them to exactly what your organization requires. For example, at the Ai4 conference last week, I bumped into Joel Hron, CTO of Thomson Reuters, who explained why the company has built its own foundation model after concluding that it needed to own its own intelligence and not outsource it to frontier labs. The result has been a model that's also much smaller and cheaper to run. However, that requires expensive AI expertise and time. Even if you can afford to hire AI engineers and convince them to come work for your company instead of a hot AI startup, it can take months or longer to develop your own custom models. Oumi is using AI to do what Thomson Reuters and other advanced enterprises have done and make it more accessible to organizations that don't have the same level of in-house expertise. The promise is also that it can happen a lot faster. Using Oumi's web console, you can prompt the tool to build your organization's custom model in a way that's very similar to prompting Claude Code to build you an app. "It would [previously] take you weeks and months, and you can do it now literally often in minutes," Manos Koukoumidas, CEO of Oumi and former Google Gemini lead, told The Deep View. "[It's] hours on the clock... but it could be minutes of human effort." ## Our Deeper *View* Over the past couple years, frontier labs Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have convinced a lot of enterprises that AI is going to revolutionize their future. But right now, one of the natural next conclusions is that many enterprises don't want to rent their intelligence from these companies. Instead, they'd rather control it so that they can customize it, better manage on-going costs, and have full control over their most proprietary data. That's a big part of what's driving the rising interest and momentum around open models. But it's also expensive and time-consuming up-front to customize open models for your enterprise. And then there's the on-going cost of retraining your custom model to keep it up to date. That's where Oumi has stepped up to offer a platform that makes building, deploying, and updating your own custom models far more streamlined.