“Glue code” is the small – occasionally not so small – scripts that make a business run more efficiently. A conduit between the CRM and the billing system to keep contact details current. Importing a vendor’s daily stock file into the ERP. Filtering existing customers out of a marketing list before somebody emails them a new-customer offer.
It is what made integration services an overnight success. Every business has silos, and breaking them open is one of the reliable routes to growth.
One example we know well: the largest insurance broker in the Pacific Northwest had six separate lines of business that could not see each other’s work. Removing those walls raised cross-referrals between them by 60% – which added 33% to gross sales. The same customers, the same products, the same staff; the only thing that changed was that one part of the firm could now see what another part was doing.
Where AI fits
Most of what gets reported is AI disasters, and the occasional faked success. Around 95% of AI efforts do not reach the bottom line. But there is a category that does not appear in those statistics at all.
AI is a powerful time-saver for someone who is already a subject-matter expert – including IT people writing glue code. That is a very different proposition from handing a business process to a chatbot.
Done properly the benefits stack up:
- If the result is used strictly internally, security is much less of a concern.
- AI coding tools do send data out, where it can leak – but glue code is generally generic, and test data can be generic too, so the exposure is far lower than it looks.
- When it is done you own the code and can change it. And you are not paying rent on it every month.
One example
A hosted service that syncs invoice data from a proprietary internal application into a cloud accounting package simply was not working. Three options were on the table: keep fighting with the vendor’s support after months of no progress, find a new provider and start over, or build it.
The answer was behind door three. With AI assistance, an entire bridging application was written in one day – by somebody who knew the data well but had minimal coding and interface experience. The AI did the heavy lifting; the person supplied the usability judgement, the subject-matter expertise, and the rigour to test and sanity-check the results.
Not every problem yields that easily. But this is the shape of the opportunity most businesses are missing: not replacing experts, but handing them a much faster way to build the thing only they know is needed.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our business process analysis work deals with – talk to us about yours.
