Those of us who grow into Leadership in IT do so primarily powered by one driving factor—our curiosity.  Curious nerd-dom  has been a dominant theme in this community.  You wouldn’t be reading this column if you hadn’t been interested in how you could take technology and use it to solve some sort of business problem.

Aw, no, sorry. If we’re going to be honest with each other … and I can trust you with a secret, can’t I? … you were less interested in how technology could solve business problems than you were interested in a seriously cool innovation of some kind.

Because it was seriously cool, you wanted an excuse to play with it. That excuse was that it could solve some business problems. You needed the excuse because our business counterparts frowned upon us IT nerds just wanting to have fun.

And just as you saw the potential in a cool technology and explained it with enthusiasm, your colleagues saw the potential in you. Or likely, lots of other people saw this in you, as you worked to address some challenges that somebody mentioned to you or that you saw in your own. You probably had some sort of “Eureka” moment that you remember clearly about how you made some sort of new magic happen, and it was driven in part by your curiosity.

Don’t be shy – share your experience of this in the Comments.

Recognizing the power of curiosity, you may have used this as a criteria in how you have grown and managed people in their careers as well—I believe that in every organization, we are looking for others that can solve a problem innovatively.  We see people with these strengths as worthy of our trust, and we are more likely to wish to work with them, mentor them, and see them flourish and grow.

There are countless bitchy columns complaining about Millennials and Gen Z workers, and their poor work ethics.  This flannel wearing, grunge listening, Gen X columnist rejects these ideas as utter nonsense, having heard the same disparagements aimed at my cohort.    But, I do have a warning and plea—We need to continue to encourage curiosity, on the clock, and off, for our staff to grow and thrive.

Since we are starting to figure out what AI will do to our profession,  let’s point out that AI is insatiably curious.  It doesn’t care about politics, Tik Tok trends, cat videos or anime movies( or at least, it has the same unlimited curiosity for each of these topics.)   It is always interested in studying what others have posted on GitHub, or any other place that there is new content.  AI doesn’t sleep, and doesn’t want to take PTO.

The results of this—New hiring for developers (and others) has slowed  to a crawl.  In talking with others, new engineers, PMs and others at the entry level are having a hard time getting hired, regardless of the specialty.

What is to be done?

Well, I for one, welcome our new AI overlords.

But, on top of that, I would ask all of us to coach, mentor and encourage our staff to not get distracted, always be learning, and find our super powers of curiosity.  A few nights and weekends of growth and self directed learning turn out to be the key to many of our careers. And we need to help others find this answer as well, so that they can continue to build meaningful careers.

Every so often you get a glimpse of the future, but it may not be quite what the people writing the message are hoping that you glean.

I just got back from the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago, and was incredibly impressed by new machine tools, robots everywhere and really smart people trying to figure out the ROI of the latest and greatest systems for manufacturing.

Of course, AI was a prominent topic.  Some big infrastructure companies were promising how their solutions could help improve customer sales and experiences, drive connected and sustainable operations, and deliver faster and better R&D and product design.  Production planning, supply chain and marketing are all part of these stories as well, and frankly, what is being discussed is well thought out, and seems plausible.  There seem to be enough experiments going on at enough companies to learn what is working and not working.   One number that stood out from a reputable source is that 60% of manufacturing companies are using Generative AI in production for something right now.

Not surprisingly, the software companies that are linked the closest to design and engineering are some of the software companies making the biggest claims about their new and upcoming products.  After Marketing Automation software,  CAD, Design, and engineering software might be the next disrupted marketing for generative AI.  I don’t see Mechanical Engineers, GIS professionals or others being replaced, but their lives being made significantly easier by having a helper to manage small dimensional updates, material changes, etc.  As an example, having an AI help in routine Product Lifecycle Management tasks would be godsend.

Now to the dog that didn’t bark—The backend for all of this.

For engineering and design software to be truly AI enabled, it needs training and historical data, and lots of it.  This sort of data is specialized enough that it doesn’t always or necessarily translate easily to traditional data warehouses, RDBMS, etc.   Additionally, the data might be on slow SANs or spinning drives collecting dust, or not online all of the time.

Additionally, for years, software companies have been eager to shift more CPU and GPU tasks to the cloud to harness the full power of large-scale rendering and design computing. However, this ambition has been hampered by bandwidth limitations and load issues—both internally and across the internet.  I think a real computer scientist would throw up their hands in despair about the fact that these loads are not easy to cache, out of order, and hard to store in any sort of persistent manner.   I spent a big part of today, trying to figure out how to talk about the load challenges of nested products in a manufacturing planning algorithm (MRP), and realizing even these loads are challenging.

Ironically, the companies that will solve this issue weren’t present at IMTS. The solution lies with cloud providers, who will need to re-engineer data centers and develop new interconnection models that allow seamless access to massive datasets and decentralized GPU and CPU processing. I believe this evolution will lead to what I call The Great Re-Cloud of 2026.  The Old Cloud is going to need to be replaced by the New Cloud.

In this future, you, Mr or Ms Director of IT, are going to be presented some fantastic new options from your Enterprise Software Publisher.  These new, game changing capabilities, however, are going to require a deeper sort of migration than you have been faced with previously, and advanced Cloud performance is going to be one of your evaluation criteria.  The smart software publishers will partner with cool startups, and the not so smart publishers will try to build their own infrastructure (poorly).  Some of these attempts are going to not work out, and it probably makes sense to have a Plan B in your back pocket.

You, however, will become an expert in high performance computing (Or recruit and develop trusted experts for your team).   For the nerds, the best days are ahead of us.