This visit didn't happen by accident – yet by the virtue of serendipity. It happened because our wonderful partner SIBB does what the best networks do: they stand by their motto of connecting digital minds not only in Berlin, but across the world. This bridge from Ghent to Berlin, from a lecture hall to a development floor, was also facilitated by Berlin Partner, where the request landed in the first place.

What made me proudest, though, was watching my team prepare for these students and go not into lecture mode, but into vivid exchange, collaboration, and workshop. My software developers could have done the obvious thing: show the stack, demo the architecture, walk through the sprint board, and let the students dissolve into reminiscing about a night-on-the-loose in Berlin (raise your hand if you remember those nights! Raise a glass if you're trying to remember, but it's blurry). Instead, they designed an immersive session around something much harder to teach and much easier to overlook: communication.

That choice is not nostalgia and not an atavism. Au contraire: in the age of AI, it's a thesis and a challenge we accept. And it rests on three reasons:

• Metcalfe's Law. The usefulness of a system is proportional to the number of its users: which is really a fancy way of saying that a network's value lives in the conversations happening across it, not in the nodes themselves. Hence, the real value of your software will depend on the number of users who are in love with it. On “your true fans”, to quote Seth Godin.
• The technological reason. The more sophisticated our tools become, the more the burden shifts. Someone has to translate capability into meaning for the people who depend on the output but will never read the code (and never needed to – yet to build their work, their dreams, their lives and transfer their magic into this world based on and thank to it). That translation is a human act, not unlike a divine spark.
• The philosophical and existential reason. The oldest idea in the room is still the truest one: we are wired for wholeness, for one-ness, for understanding that only happens between two people actually trying to reach each other. Humans are social animals. That hasn't been patched out. Yes, this makes us buggy, causes our hearts and gut to overwrite "truly rational" decisions – and cries for a human in the loop.

AI can draft, summarize, generate, optimize. What it can't do is care whether you understood, run an extra mile after you, and bring you to water. That's still our job – also as software developers and especially as IT consultants. And if anything, it's becoming the job and we are proud to deliver.

So to my team: thank you for building a day that put the human part in the spotlight. To the students from HOGENT: thank you for showing up curious. And to SIBB and our Berlin Partner: thank you for making the introduction in the first place.

The most analog thing in the room turned out to be the most future-proof – just as a fireside talk has been all along…