A Week as an AI Integration Consultant
Most weeks I don't write much new code. I read other people's systems, draw arrows on a whiteboard, and try to figure out which of the twelve places customer data lives is the one I should actually trust. That is the honest shape of AI integration work in a B2B company that has been shipping since 2014. The LLM is the easy part. The plumbing is the job.
Here are field notes from a recent week doing exactly this, plus the checklist I wish every founder had in hand before they hire anyone (me included) to bolt an LLM onto their stack.
Monday: Mapping the data flow before touching a prompt
The client wanted "an AI assistant that answers customer questions from our knowledge base and CRM." That is a sentence, not a specification. My first day is almost always the same: I map where data actually lives, who writes to it, and how stale it is by the time anyone reads it.
