The pace of change in artificial intelligence (AI) has been nothing short of extraordinary and it’s now truly embedded in our daily working and personal lives; for better or worse. There are dissenting voices: “AI will take over”; and often the criticism focuses on AI itself. Personally, I have worries about what it all means for the next generation of engineers.
Our challenge is to ensure AI is used as a tool to enhance, and not replace, the brilliance, creativity, and curiosity of human talent. That’s hard as we struggle to comprehend what’s coming next,
At the moment, AI tools are already perhaps as good as an undergraduate. With some help, they can solve some simple engineering tasks. Though, for now, they seem to have limited abilities to ‘learn’; they have a limited ‘context’. If you bend an AI agent to your will, if you lose that context, you are back at square one.
They will get better. The next release of your favourite AI engine will already be more capable than the one you are just beginning to get to grips with, and none of us has really got to grips with what all this will mean.
Meanwhile, in anticipation, companies, from engineering to accounting, are reducing their recruitment of junior staff. For instance, The Observer (UK) reported a 44% reduction in graduate jobs amongst the top four accountancy firms (29 July 2025).
Society, will adapt. We will find ways to use AI, not just to replace jobs, but there will be new ways of working. The question is, when we understand how to do that, where will the ‘junior’ engineers be?
These people are currently much smarter than AI. They will learn and they won’t lose their context. They have interests and ideas that lead them down paths we haven’t thought about. They invent, they create. They are the future.
There is another strange dichotomy in the advance of AI. Where the automatic agents really shine, is where they have the data on which they learn. Ask an AI agent to write some HTML code and you’ll get amazingly good results. Ask it to suggest simple fixes to a proprietary project and you’ll get generic responses which won’t help much. For open source projects, on which the AI has been trained, results are good.
If companies want AI to be useful, the easiest route is to make their code open. That trend has obviously been around for a while, but now, when we ask AI to stand on our shoulders, it becomes more important than ever and there is no real choice but to open up.
We need to embrace AI, not passively, but by actively shaping how it fits into our workflows and values. To truly benefit from AI, we must also benefit more from each other. The future lies in open, collaborative ecosystems: wider, more inclusive, and more transparent. Bringing the engineering community together and fostering the next generation of engineers at industry conferences will only become more important.
Mark Burton is general chair of DVCon Europe 2025.
