Shaping the Future Proactively, and Owning Your Part in It

Vibe coding has become part of everyday work for us: many people on the team use AI to build their own prototypes and small applications, including in areas where nobody coded before. In client projects, first prototypes often appear so quickly that clients are regularly surprised. We are also replacing more and more purchased tools with ones we build ourselves.

Tech-savvy people have existed in every department for a long time, whether through spreadsheets, automation tools or low-code platforms. As early as 2021, Gartner spoke of business technologists who build technical solutions outside of IT. What is new is that AI now makes accessible a level that used to require programming skills: building your own prototypes and tools. As a result, many new competencies have been added to our team, and we expect more to follow.

And it is not only us: with clients and partners, too, we see a steadily growing shift in roles and areas of responsibility. Whether a team helps shape developments like these with foresight depends largely on whether companies not only allow it but actively empower people to do so.

Shaping the future with foresight means exploring new technologies and their implications early. Over several years, we have gained many insights into what technologies make possible and how they interact with roles, tasks and people, particularly in our own R&D projects, some of them publicly funded. These insights only truly make a difference, however, once they flow back into the company and its core business and ultimately reach our clients and partners as well. In this way, R&D is evolving from a separate, self-contained department into a company-wide R&D mindset that empowers everyone to explore with ownership and to turn insights into real impact.

In our experience, exploration works best when people take responsibility for it themselves. After all, it is not only about technology, but also, for example, about the future of one’s own role, of the company, or of one’s own impact. For that, people need to be well equipped. It helps to clarify up front what might stand in their way, such as:

Back to our opening example: the biggest change in our daily work right now is vibe coding. When prototypes can come from the whole team, that inevitably changes the role of Engineering. Engineering focuses on secure, curated infrastructure on which others in the team can deploy their own prototypes and take responsibility for them. That makes Engineering an enabling function within the team, and everyone who builds is building on what Engineering makes secure.

Secure infrastructure does not replace verification. Built quickly does not mean reliable: a prototype replaces neither a reviewed architecture nor a security review, and the more people build, the more important it becomes that someone can judge what will truly hold up. The same applies to texts, analyses and designs created with AI. LeadDev, a professional platform for engineering leaders, wrote in April 2026 that generating code is cheap while verifying it is expensive. Verifying and taking responsibility thus become a core competency that everyone needs, each for what they are responsible for themselves.

Anyone who wants to stay future-proof should enable their teams to help shape the future with foresight and to share responsibility for it. That takes responsibility that is actually handed over, people who are well equipped for it, and insights that flow back into the core business.

Vibe coding is just one example that makes the trend visible and shows how much the roles across all departments are changing. We expect department boundaries to blur further in the future and competency profiles to gain importance, without specialization losing value. Companies should start now to think across departments, take stock of competencies and foster self-directed competency building within their teams.