One of the things I have been thinking about lately is what happens when experience, new technology, and the next generation of technology professionals come together.

That thought has come up several times over the past few days. Interestingly, artificial intelligence has been part of both conversations.

I wrote recently about my growing use of AI and how my perspective on it has changed. I think this is a good follow-up to that conversation because I have realized that my use of AI is not about having AI do my work for me. It is about having another tool available when I am trying to solve a problem, think through a decision, or look at something from a perspective I might not have considered on my own.

I am not apologizing for using it.

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Using AI to Think Through Business

Yesterday, I used AI to work through a very real question about Vogel Consulting.

I am getting to the point where I am thinking about how I could eventually add an employee to the business. I do not want to create a position simply because I think having another person around would be nice. If I bring someone into the company, I want to be able to provide a livable wage, give that person meaningful work, and build a business model that can support the position without putting the company in a difficult financial position.

That requires more than deciding what I think I can afford to pay someone.

I need to understand what that employee would cost the business, how much billable work would be required to support the position, what utilization would be realistic, how the billing rates would work, and what adding another person would mean for my own workload and compensation.

I could build that model myself. I have enough experience with spreadsheets and business planning to do that.

Instead, I asked AI to help me work through it.

I gave it the assumptions I was considering and asked it to help me look at different scenarios. I also asked AI to point out things I might not be thinking about.

That last part is where I find AI particularly useful.

I do not want AI to tell me what decision to make. I use it to help me make sure I have considered the decision from enough angles that I can make a better one.

There is a significant difference between those two things.

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Experience Still Matters

The day before that, I was using AI to think about something completely different.

I was thinking about how more than 30 years of experience could be combined with the skills of someone who is just beginning a technology career.

That question has become more important to me as I think about the future of Vogel Consulting.

I have spent most of my career working with business systems and the people who depend on them. I have worked with IBM i, RPG, ERP systems, databases, integrations, operations, software vendors, developers, business users, and clients.

I have watched technologies come and go. I have also had the opportunity to see what happens when technology decisions work well and what happens when they do not.

A lot of that knowledge is difficult to get from a classroom.

It comes from having to figure out why something does not work when everyone involved thinks it should. It comes from sitting with a business user who explains a problem in business terms and then figuring out what that means technically. It comes from looking at systems somebody else built years ago and trying to understand why it works the way it does before deciding whether it should be changed.

Sometimes it comes from making the wrong decision yourself and having to live with the consequences.

That experience has value.

But I have also come to realize that experience has limited value if I keep it to myself.

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I Am a Generation X Consultant

I am Generation X, which is an interesting place to be in the workforce.

Our generation spent much of our careers adapting to technology that changed faster than the organizations around us could adapt to it. We moved from a world where many business systems were built around processes that had existed for decades into one where cloud computing, APIs, mobile devices, automation, and now artificial intelligence are changing how businesses operate.

We also spent a relatively short amount of time as the largest generation in the workforce before the generations behind us began taking that position.

I do not think that is something we need to fight.

Our generation is eventually going to retire. That is not a failure. It does not mean that the knowledge we acquire becomes irrelevant. It means that we have a responsibility to make sure that knowledge does not disappear with us.

I do not want the value of my 30-plus years of experience to be that I am the only person who knows how something works.

If a business depends on one person because that person is the only one who understands a system, that is not really a sign of success. It is a risk.

I would rather take what I know and use it to make someone else better.

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The Next Generation Does Not Need Another Version of Me

This is where I think the combination of experience and newer technology becomes particularly interesting.

Someone coming into technology today is going to have strengths that I did not have when I started my career. They are going to be familiar with technologies and approaches that were not part of the environment I entered.

That does not make my experience less valuable.

It means there are two different sets of knowledge that can be combined.

I can explain why a business system may have been built in a certain way. I can explain what can go wrong when you change it. I can explain what questions need to be asked before touching a system that a company has depended on for years.

Someone earlier in their career may be able to look at that same problem and immediately see possibilities that would not have occurred to me because their experience with newer technology is different.

That is not a competition.

That is an opportunity.

I do not want to create another version of myself. I want to help create someone who can take what I know, combine it with what THEY know, and eventually do things that neither of us could have done alone.

That is a much more interesting goal to me.

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AI Fits Into That Too

This is one reason I have become less interested in the argument about whether people should use AI.

The more interesting question is how they use it.

If I ask AI a question and accept the first answer it gives me without understanding it, checking it, or applying my own judgment, then I have not really improved my thinking.

But if I use AI to challenge my assumptions, identify gaps, compare alternatives, research something I do not understand, or help me organize a complicated problem, then it becomes a very useful part of my process.

The same thing applies to someone early in their career.

AI can give that person access to information and explanations that would have taken considerably more effort to find when I was starting out.

That does not mean they suddenly have 30 years of experience.

They do not.

Experience still comes from doing the work.

It comes from dealing with problems that do not have clean answers. It comes from making decisions when you do not have all the information. It comes from talking to people, making mistakes, fixing things, and eventually developing some sense of what is likely to go wrong before it does.

AI cannot give someone that history.

But it can potentially help shorten the distance between encountering a problem for the first time and beginning to understand how to approach it.

That is a powerful tool.

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What I Want Vogel Consulting to Become

This has made me think differently about what I want Vogel Consulting to become.

When I started the company, I was focused on getting clients, doing good work, building relationships, and proving that I could make this business work.

That was necessary.

A new business does not go very far without those things.

But I do not want the long-term value of Vogel Consulting to be limited to what I can personally accomplish.

As the business grows, I want to be able to bring other people into it and give them an opportunity to develop into capable consultants.

That does not mean giving someone a title because they have the right degree, because they are related to me, or simply because I need help.

It means creating a path where someone can take the knowledge I have accumulated, combine it with their own abilities, and gradually take on more responsibility as they demonstrate that they are ready.

That person does not need to become an RPG programmer because I spent part of my career writing RPG.

They need to understand enough about the systems and technologies that came before them to work effectively with clients whose businesses still depend on those systems. At the same time, they need to understand the technologies that are changing how those businesses will operate in the future.

That combination is where I see a lot of opportunities.

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I Do Not Think We Should Hold On to Power

There is a natural tendency for people who have spent decades building their careers to hold tightly to what they know.

Experience gives you credibility. It gives you authority. It gives you a position within an organization.

But if that position becomes something you feel you must protect, I think you have missed part of the point.

At some point, the people coming behind us need the opportunity to take responsibility.

They need the opportunity to make decisions.

They need the opportunity to make mistakes and figure out how to recover from them.

And they need people with experience who are willing to explain not just what to do, but why.

The ship has sailed for my generation to be in control of the workforce.

I do not think we should even want that.

Our job is not to stay in control forever. Our job is to make sure the people coming behind us are ready when it is their turn.

I would much rather see experienced people helping the next generation become capable enough that we can eventually step aside knowing that the work is in good hands.

That is not giving up what we built.

It is building something that can continue without us.

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Moving Forward

I do not know exactly what the next five or ten years will look like for Vogel Consulting.

I have some ideas, but I have learned enough over the past 30 years to know that plans do not always turn out the way you expect.

I know technology will continue to change. I know AI will become increasingly integrated into the way businesses and consultants work. I also know that the experience required to understand business systems, organizations, people, and the consequences of technology decisions is not going to disappear simply because we have better tools.

If anything, I think that experience becomes more important as the tools become more powerful.

The opportunity is in combining the two.

I want to continue learning about what is coming next while making use of what I have already spent more than 30 years learning.

I want to use AI without pretending it replaces judgment.

I want to work with people who bring skills and perspectives that are different from mine.

And eventually, I want to be able to hand some of what I have built to people who can take it further than I could have taken it myself.

That is what I have been thinking about this week.

Maybe the real measure of experience is not how long you have been doing something.

Maybe it is what you choose to do with everything you have learned once you realize that your career is no longer just about building yourself.

For me, I think the next part is about building something that can outlast me.