When companies talk about building AI, everybody suddenly wants an AI engineer.
They want data scientists. Machine learning engineers. Prompt engineers. Agent developers.
And somewhere in the corner sits the data engineer thinking:
„Interesting. And what exactly are you planning to give this AI?“
Because there is an awkward truth behind almost every impressive AI system:
The model gets the attention.
The data engineering makes it work.
You can buy access to essentially the same models as your competitors.
You cannot buy ten years of clean operational data, well-understood business events, sensible schemas and reliable pipelines quite so easily.