The Fries Are the Meal

Everybody wants the burger.

The AI burger. The big, juicy model everyone at the table is pointing at. Order the AI. Get the AI. Put the AI on a slide.

Nobody orders the fries. They assume it comes with the burger. Silly customer.

The fries are integration. They complete the meal. They are your data and plumbing. Knowing where your information lives, how it moves, who owns it, what it means, and whether the thing you are about to pair with that juicy burger, eh, feed to a brilliant model, is even tasty enough to eat. It is unglamorous. Nobody brags about it. And it is the entire meal. Because everything is just fine until you realize the fries suck. And then the meal goes with it.

It still surprises me how easily we walk past what we already know how to do. So I’m saying it again.

I did not figure this out in the AI era. I wrote it down in 2019.

I found the note the other day. A message to my team from October of that year, years before any of this. The title was “Data Burger with a Side of Integration Fries.” It made one argument: the company is getting hungry for data, and we are not ready to serve the meal, because we do not actually know where all of our data lives. Start small. Map it out. Go stitch one bit to the next. The data was never the valuable part. Knowing where it lived and what to do with it was.

Seven years later, swap “data” for “AI,” and I would not change a word.

The model is the easy part now. You can rent a world-class one by the prompt. What you cannot rent is a decade of knowing your own business well enough to feed it something worth eating. Your data strategy doesn’t have to be solved with a massive 8- or 9-digit budget. It needs to be broken down into prioritized domains, shepherded by the businesspeople who know it best, and managed to a useful state for consumption one chunk at a time.

The AI at our company works because of the years we spent on the unglamorous half: curating the data, connecting the systems, writing down what everything actually means. Nobody asked for that work. Nobody put it in a slide deck. But it is the reason the rest of it stands up.

Everybody is ordering the burger right now.

Order the fries too. That is the part that makes it a meal.