German Gazzoni, Vice President, AYI Group

AYI Group was founded in Córdoba 26 years ago as an Oracle technology service provider. We started out as an Oracle partner, then expanded into many other technologies. Today, we’re a partner of Salesforce, AWS, and Oracle, and we use these tools to add value for clients across industries such as insurance, healthcare, the public sector, retail, and consumer goods.

Our purpose is to co-create solutions with our clients that generate impact across the ecosystem. We build custom-made solutions, and right now, nearly everything we do involves AI in some form. But our focus isn’t on adopting the latest or “coolest” tools for their own sake — we believe this kind of innovation can create real disruption in the market. We’re helping clients improve performance and customer experience, cut costs, and grow through AI.

For example, we’re developing a solution to improve customer experience for one client, and in healthcare, we’re helping patients get attention sooner. We’re also applying AI to our own operations as software developers, significantly reducing the effort and time it takes to build custom solutions. That’s letting us bring new services to market faster. And we’re working with several clients to migrate legacy systems onto new technology using AI as the underlying platform, cutting the time and effort of those initiatives in half.

We stay very close to our clients, working as a strategic partner rather than just a technology provider — almost becoming part of their companies. We know them well and maintain strong relationships. Technology evolves week by week, so the only way to stay competitive is to keep pace with our clients and adapt our offering to their needs every month, not every year.

AI has been the biggest disruption of these 25 years — no previous technology has had this much impact on our industry. It’s reshaped all of our services and practices. Today, 100% of our developers use AI tools to build software; we try to avoid writing code by hand, since nearly everything is now generated by AI agents. In effect, we’ve turned our developers into orchestrators of those agents rather than traditional coders.

The critical phase of development now happens at the start — analyzing requirements and designing the solution properly, so the end result meets our clients’ expectations and quality standards. Many companies are relying on byte coding to build software, but that approach brings real risks around security and scalability. We stay engineering-led by default, applying proper governance and security so that anything we build with AI is just as solid as work done by hand.

One lesson from this kind of project is that many legacy systems are still genuinely useful — the functionality and processes they run still matter to the business. But migrating or modernizing the technology alone isn’t enough; you also need to add new capabilities and interfaces to make it work for the client. We typically combine legacy modernization with new feature development, alongside implementing third-party platforms like ERP or CRM systems.

Our real value comes from bringing all three together: legacy modernization, custom development, and world-class platform implementation. No single one of these solves the whole problem on its own — it takes all three to build something that truly works for the client.

Forgetting the change management of the people. When you implement new technology without caring about the people who will interact with it, the project will fail.

I’d say it’s about overestimating what a given technology can do. Sometimes we get excited about something new and go looking for a problem to solve with it, instead of starting with the actual challenge and then finding what fits. Technologists, in particular, tend to fall in love with the newest tool and try to force it onto every use case — but often, something else does the job better. The right approach is to define the problem first, then choose whatever solves it best.

Blockchain is a classic example. We got caught up in it, became enthusiasts, and then went searching for something to apply it to. That’s shifted a lot over the past few years.

My main motivation is improving people’s lives. That’s what technology should be for — if it isn’t doing that, it isn’t contributing to humanity. I think everything ultimately comes down to building a better life for people.

There’s a lot of debate in tech circles about whether AI will harm humanity. I see it the opposite way — AI is here to make our lives better. What drives me is figuring out how we use it to do exactly that.