Interview If AI can take on the role of a junior programmer, what happens when senior staff start retiring? Industry veteran and CEO of Safe Software, Don Murray, reckons the technology is becoming indispensable, but the human can never be removed from the loop.

"I think as an assistant," says Murray, "AI is indispensable. But it is not an authority."

Murray's company, Safe, specializes in data collation. Be it real-time or static, data flows through Safe's data pipe and can be output to any visualization tool the customer is using. It is therefore ripe for AI applications, both in mining the flow of data and in pursuing an agentic AI path to take action. Murray, having seen industry fads come and go over a multi-decade career, is therefore well placed to comment on the latest tech industry obsession: AI.

"If there's one thing AI has a never-ending thirst for," he says, "it's data."

Workers might also worry that AI – or its proponents – have a thirst for something else: their jobs.

Murray, while an enthusiast for the technology, is also a realist about its application. Yes, it can certainly appear magical when it comes to accessibility and user interaction (Murray uses the example of the technology being used to build systems that work the way users do, instead of forcing users into a box defined by technology), but he is also a realist about the service and what it can do, cannot do and should never do.

Murray cites the example of a company working on a major engineering project in the UK (Safe has many such customers, including airports and power networks) that asked a vendor: "How accurate is your AI?" The answer, "oh, you can get to 80 or 90 percent," was nowhere near the requirement, which is more like 99.999 percent, certainly when it comes to engineering.

"And so one of the things you're going to see in agentic systems," he says, "is this 'human in the loop'.

"Basically, the AI will do its magic, and then it will throw it to a human who has the credentials to sign off on the design.

"AI can help you build a bridge. If you're an engineer, it can go through lots of different designs and help you get there, but there's no organization that's going to allow it to sign off."

Instead, Murray reckons AI will be an assistant. Able to throw up some suggestions to, for example, a medical professional, and come up with ideas that might never have occurred to a Doctor. But it can't be the final authority on a subject.

The problem comes with companies that see AI as more than an assistant. "I talk to utility companies," says Murray, "and they're saying that the experts who have been in the business forever use AI. The company is saying, 'We don't have to hire junior people.'

"So then I'm like, 'When all those people retire, who's going to be the expert now? You're not giving these people the experience for 10, 20, 30 years so they can step into the role. There's only one way to get experience, and that's time and actually experiencing things."

Murray is a veteran of the tech industry and practices what he preaches when it comes to AI adoption for his own staff. "We're using it to bring everybody up to speed," he explains, with the assistant having an impact at all levels.

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"I have this guy who is amazing and has been around forever, and AI for him is very valuable because he can see very quickly what is correct and what isn't correct. Whereas the junior people, it is a benefit that can help them write some code quickly, but they still have to go through the testing."

Murray reckons that, instead, AI is useful for suggesting how a given system might be supported or which libraries to use.

"We're hiring juniors and seniors," he says, "and then we're using it to bring everybody up to speed."

As far as Murray is concerned, the genie is out of the bottle. "People say," he says, "it's just a bubble. Maybe it is just a bubble. But AI is here for good; it's sort of like the Internet. It was a bubble, but it didn't go away [when the bubble burst]."

Regardless of what happens, "AI is here to stay." ®