Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Dütscher, with over 25 years of experience as a developer of standard software, JAM Software now wants to supplement its offerings with the provision of custom AI solutions. What specific measures have you taken first in this transformation?

Marcel Dütscher: First, we decided to allocate 20% of our personnel resources solely for open-ended research and development work and formed our own innovation team for this purpose. We wanted to create a space where ideas could emerge that are far from the beaten path. One day per week – our so-called Experimentation Day – our employees were to specifically work on ideas that had nothing to do with our current concrete projects. Of course, this approach involved a risk – but it quickly yielded concrete results. We have since established innovation as an independent Key Objective in all teams at JAM Software.

Wirtschaftsforum: How did the team react to these freedoms?

Marcel Dütscher: At first, it was quite a challenge to encourage the team to engage completely openly with a new problem – this requires a different skill set than is typically demanded of IT experts in the classical architectural perspective: While a software architect accompanies and develops a specific product over many years, always ensuring it remains stable with the latest updates, rapid prototyping often calls for completely different competencies – to put it simply, the approach here is: "I don't care if you use copy-paste from an open-source solution or build it out of duct tape – as long as it works for now. And tomorrow, it might already be history!"

Wirtschaftsforum: How is the range of concepts that a successful software developer needs to bring in the future generally changing?

Marcel Dütscher: Previously, a software developer should primarily work as precisely as possible. However, now that we can interact with language-capable machines, it becomes more important to accurately recognize the concrete metaproblem and articulate it skillfully. At the same time, however, a broad technical knowledge is still required in order to precisely assess what the machine is actually doing in the background. Also, the way of acquiring skills will change significantly: Those who have learned programming from scratch used to learn the most from their own mistakes. However, those who can use AI support in programming do not make many of these mistakes anymore, but can achieve much better results much faster than was possible before. Therefore, we also need no less a revolution in the education sector!

Wirtschaftsforum: What effects does the new business field have on your core business and what specific benefits does it generate for your customers?

Marcel Dütscher: AI holds possibilities that we could only imagine in the context of science fiction until now. In 2023, the steering committee at JAM Software has extensively dealt with the question of what significance this revolution will have not only for our previous entrepreneurial hobby – standard software solutions – but also for the use of computers in general. It was clear to us that we had to face this disruptive impact. Certainly, we will be able to build on an attractive business model for many more years with our established standard solutions TreeSize, UltraSearch, and SpaceObServer, which we also want to continue developing in the future. However, our owner Joachim Marder pursues the clear vision that this company should outlast him. Just sticking to what has worked well so far would not ensure that. We are convinced that it will not be long before automated systems will be able to solve specific software problems for all users, and there will certainly be different revolutions in different industries. Therefore, we are focusing strongly on individualized B2B business with our AI solutions. In the process, we are surveying with our clients which pain points specifically concern them in order to quickly create initial prototypes on this basis, which are then rapidly developed into implementable solutions. We are always open to new customer projects – interested parties are welcome to contact us.