AI is an amplifier. Your foundations still matter.

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Valerie Taerwe, AI Thought Leader & AE Business Unit Manager Applications and Jo Van Eyck, AI Influencer & AE Software Engineer, joined Digital Excellence Connect 2026 (AE’s annual flagship client and partner event) to make a case the industry needs to hear: AI does not replace good engineering practice. It exposes where it is missing.

Handing out AI tools and hoping for the best is where most Belgian companies are today. Valerie and Jo see it differently. The organisations that will get real value from AI are not the ones moving fastest. They are the ones that have the right foundations in place.

Their message is direct: "AI is an amplifier. Everything that was important before stays super relevant today." Get it right, and you gain productivity, quality and business impact. Get it wrong, and you get rework, instability and fires to put out.

That is what their concept of AIRE (AI Reliability Engineering) is built around: making sure that as AI scales from ten experiments to thousands of agents, governance and trustworthiness scale with it.

Watch the full interview to hear how Valerie and Jo think about building AI that is not just impressive in pilots, but reliable in production.