Bart Schouw

A few months ago, I was called in to discuss an IoT business case with the leadership of a prospect that had been waiting—patiently, they told me, but impatiently, I could tell—for their home build connected asset program to deliver on its promise. The use cases were well-defined. The ROI model looked compelling on paper. And yet, somehow, the data still wasn't flowing the way it needed to. Their engineers were buried.

Preparing a presentation on the Internet of Things (IoT) in asset management for an executive rail infrastructure audience does something unexpected to you—it forces you to confront not just the technology, but the human cost of its absence. The deeper I dug into the research, the more I realized the story I was building for that room demanded a wider audience. What follows is the article that preparation forced me to write. The incidents and data woven through this piece are European.

Old Worlds Shattering “I’ve never felt this much behind as a programmer,” confessed Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s former director of AI, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), on Dec. 26, 2025. It sent shockwaves through the tech community. “The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between,” he continued. Karpathy’s words capture a profound moment of transformation—not just for developers, but for the entire digital landscape.