A word from the webmaster

Some will probably smile at what follows, and others will grind their teeth. But at 66, after more than thirty years working alongside computing, the Internet and new technologies, I believe I have gained enough experience to judge how they have evolved.

I am not a computer scientist by training. I am first and foremost a journalist, an entrepreneur and a hands-on man. I witnessed the beginnings of digital photography, the first image transmissions to international newsrooms, and then the arrival of the Internet in companies.

As early as 1997, I was a shareholder and manager of a Belgian IT company with five employees, including a particularly talented programmer. We developed websites, applications and solutions for companies in a range of sectors.

Our clients included the Music Hall group, major companies and the insurance company Mercator.

We also took part in the first e-commerce experiments in Belgium, together with ELEMENT, a technology company that worked with Banksys on electronic payment systems.

In other words, I did not discover the Internet yesterday morning.

When professionals no longer meet their clients’ expectations

In recent years, I entrusted an outside IT company with building, hosting, maintaining and developing several websites linked to my business activities in Barcelona.

I had also entrusted this company with developing a tourist app for GoCar Barcelona.

Yet the project was perfectly defined: offer visitors smart tourist routes, with historical and cultural information in seven languages, and the possibility of updating the content regularly.

What should have taken a few months turned into an endless succession of versions, corrections, promises and invoices.

After two and a half years and fourteen versions, we still had not obtained the expected result.

And all the while, the costs kept running.

For another website, invoiced at more than €1,400, we found texts full of spelling mistakes, approximate translations and descriptions that sometimes made no sense.

We had to rework a large part of the content ourselves.

On top of that came monthly fees of €125, plus another €150 for maintenance whose work we never saw live up to our expectations.

I will not even go into the search-engine problems, the security incidents, the service outages and the difficulties we had in recovering our own data and programs.

These matters are now being reviewed with our advisers.

And then I decided to work with artificial intelligence

Not to ask it to write three advertising slogans or correct a letter.

I decided to go much further.

I began rebuilding my own websites, including Happy Cargo Bike and Happy Rental Bike, using artificial intelligence as a true development partner.

I explain what I want to achieve, how I want to organise my pages, present my products, structure my information and make my staff’s work easier.

We work on the code, the features, the architecture of the sites and their administration.

I check the results, I correct, I ask for changes, and we move forward.

Of course, artificial intelligence sometimes makes mistakes. It can misread an instruction, suggest an unsuitable solution or produce code that needs fixing.

But there is a fundamental difference with some of the experiences I have had.

When I explain that a solution does not suit me, it does not try to convince me that I am wrong. It looks for another solution.

It does not tell me that I understand nothing about computing.

It does not explain that my requests are impossible before even looking at them.

It does not hand me a new invoice every time I want to move an element, change a feature or improve a page.

And above all, it lets me gradually understand what I am doing.

At 66, I have found a freedom I thought I had lost

I do not claim to have become a programmer overnight.

I know very well that an experienced developer has skills I do not have, and that artificial intelligence does not always replace.

But I note one thing: today I can design, have developed, test and improve IT tools that truly meet the needs of my businesses.

I can move forward without constantly depending on an outside provider for the slightest change.

I can also better understand what I am being charged for, what works and what does not.

And that changes the relationship between client and supplier considerably.

For a long time, IT was a field in which clients often had to trust specialists whose explanations they could not always check.

Artificial intelligence is upsetting that balance.

It makes knowledge and technical possibilities accessible that were once reserved for a relatively small circle of professionals.

The real change is not only technological

I do not believe artificial intelligence will make good IT professionals disappear.

On the contrary, the best will know how to use it to become even more effective.

However, I am convinced it will make life much harder for those who built their business on their clients’ technical dependence, on the opacity of their services or on constantly billing for basic changes.

Because clients now have a way to understand, compare, check, and sometimes do themselves what was once presented to them as a particularly complex operation.

I am now preparing new developments for my businesses, in particular around myEcar.es, with a very clear aim: to have modern, scalable tools whose workings we truly control.

Having taken part in the early days of the Internet in the 1990s, I am now discovering a new revolution.

And I must admit that it fascinates me.

Artificial intelligence will not replace human intelligence. But it may well replace a certain way of working that had ended up forgetting the essentials: listening to the client, understanding their needs and keeping one’s commitments.

At 66, I have no intention of watching this revolution go by.

I fully intend to take part in it.