The Guest: Adrian Sanchez de la Sierra, Head of AI & Innovation, Zartis
Adrian Sanchez de la Sierra, Head of AI & Innovation at Zartis, works at the intersection of research, product, and real-world delivery. His background is deliberately unconventional. From film production and education technology to data science and machine learning, Adrian has spent his career connecting problems with solutions, often before the discipline around them formally existed. Today, he focuses on helping Zartis and our clients move beyond AI demos; into reliable, production-ready systems that deliver sustained value.
As we kick off season 5 of the Story of Software, the conversation centres on what true AI transformation actually looks like. Rather than viewing AI as a tool to replace existing processes, Adrian argues that its real value comes from reimagining how organisations operate altogether – and we couldn’t agree more!
Drawing on historical examples such as electricity, power grids, and industrial transformation, he frames AI as a general-purpose technology that requires new mental models, new organisational structures, and patience to unlock its full impact.
Some of the episode highlights include:
- Why most organisations are still in the “replace” phase of AI adoption, and why reimagining systems is far harder but far more valuable.
- How historical technologies like electricity followed long, uneven paths before delivering transformational gains.
- The hidden gap between perceived and actual expertise in building production-grade AI systems.
- Why prompt-based AI development often leads to fragile products that fail silently in production.
- How coding agents and AI tools for non-developers could unlock major organisational productivity gains.
- The importance of leadership commitment, long-term thinking, and the right KPIs for transformational AI initiatives.
Q: I hear you speak quite a bit about the replace versus re-imagine framework in AI. You always explain and articulate it in a very interesting way. Can you talk a bit about that and really embellish it from a listener’s perspective?
“Yeah, of course. This isn’t an original idea of mine, but because we do a lot of conferences and because our work as consultants spans industries, company sizes, and problem spaces, you start to see patterns. One of the patterns I noticed is that I am profoundly convinced of the transformative power of AI, but I can also see that it is not having the impact it could have in companies.
When I say the impact it could have, I mean production-ready impact. Not just demos. Not just proofs of concept. At Zartis and with some of our clients, I see what is possible, but I would say that only about five percent of that potential is being realised today. That is what I believe AI can truly do. It is proven in those cases because it is working and it is adding value to both the business and the users.
And the example I tend to use is electricity because I think it is one of the most impactful and transformative technologies that we’ve had in history. The impact of electricity, I think is obvious to everyone – it’s as simple as thinking, could you live without electricity? To put it into perspective; I’d rather live without AI than electricity, I think. But if you look at the story of electricity between the moment it was discovered until it transformed society, maybe 150 years passed by. So, there is a route we have to take together, right?
Initially, electricity was used to impress people visiting a circus. We knew it was powerful and probably transformative, but people were using it to kill frogs in the circus. So after this phase, which I argue is probably similar to the release of ChatGPT, the next phase for electricity was where it became inseparable from our lives – it became commercially available and factories started using it…
I think the main blocker is our imagination. You don’t really know how to transform your society. You need to understand the technology. You need to use it. You need to fail. You need to innovate.”
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