The Future of AI Shouldn’t Belong Only to Technologists
There is a particular moment when a new technology stops feeling like something happening to us and starts feeling like something we might actually shape.
For Esteban Rocha Rodriguez, one of those moments happened in a room in Belfast.
Around 100 people had gathered for Northern Ireland’s first Claude Code meetup. They weren’t all developers. They weren’t all AI specialists. Some had arrived with little or no traditional technical background.
And then they opened their laptops.
People began building.
A card game. A flight simulator. A platform connected with rescue dogs. A star constellation project. Business tools. Ideas that, only a few years ago, might have required specialist teams, substantial budgets or months of development.
Esteban describes what happened with an analogy that stayed with me after our conversation.
It was, he said, a little like Prometheus handing fire to humanity.
Prometheus didn’t tell people exactly what to do with the fire. He gave them the capability.
And humanity built with it.
See Esteban’s post about Northern Ireland’s first Claude Code meetup on LinkedIn
That distinction matters.
Because so much of the conversation around artificial intelligence currently focuses on what the technology can do.
Esteban is interested in a different question:
What can people do once the barriers to building begin to disappear?
From soldier to systems thinker
Esteban’s journey into technology wasn’t conventional.
He began in the Spanish Army, eventually studying telecommunications systems with a focus on satellite communications. It was there that technology first became something practical: a way of connecting platoons, command centres and people who needed information to move reliably through a complex system.
His career later moved through business analysis, product management, energy, systems architecture and AI.
Today, through Rathunas Consultancy, he works across AI solutions, product development, technology strategy and digital transformation — helping organisations understand complex systems and translate emerging technology into practical action.
On paper, the different stages of his career may look like separate disciplines.
But the connecting thread is curiosity.
He likes understanding how something works, what problem sits underneath it and what has to change to make the overall system work better.
That becomes particularly important with AI.
Because organisations are under enormous pressure to “do something with AI.”
But Esteban believes that may be the wrong place to start.
When a business tells him it wants to implement AI, one of his first questions is:
“What is the intelligence that you want to bring?”
Not: Which AI platform should we buy?
Not: Where can we add a chatbot?
But: What are we actually trying to achieve?
That question changes the conversation.
It takes AI away from being an objective in itself and turns it back into what technology should have been all along: a means of solving a meaningful problem.
AI can accelerate the wrong thing too
This is one of the contradictions at the centre of AI adoption. Artificial intelligence can make a process dramatically faster. But what happens when the process itself is bad?
You can automate inefficiency.
You can accelerate poor decision-making.
You can increase costs.
You can expose sensitive organisational knowledge.
And you can create outputs at enormous speed without necessarily creating additional value.
Esteban’s argument is not that organisations should fear AI. It is that they need to understand it. Governance, controls, data, evaluation and clear objectives need to sit alongside experimentation. Because technological capability and usefulness are not the same thing. A system can be extraordinary and still fail to improve anyone’s life.
Then something interesting happens: the builders change
Perhaps one of the most important stories Esteban shared came from the Belfast meetup.
One attendee had no coding background and no traditional technical expertise.
What he had was a problem he understood.
He ran a hospitality business and knew the workflows he needed.
Using AI-assisted development, he created an application to help operate that business.
A few years earlier, Esteban says, a similar system might have resulted in a £10,000–£20,000 development quote.
Now the business owner was able to begin building it himself.
That shift is much bigger than cheaper software.
It changes who gets to participate in innovation.
The person closest to a problem no longer necessarily has to explain their idea to a long chain of people before somebody with technical skills can begin turning it into something tangible.
They can experiment.
They can prototype.
They can learn.
They can become a builder.
And perhaps that is one of the most disruptive aspects of this generation of technology.
The democratisation of technology does not simply give us new software.
It gives more people the ability to turn an idea into action.
But accessibility has to come with literacy
Making AI easier to use does not make understanding it less important.
It makes understanding it more important.
Esteban talks about this through his own children.
He wants them not simply to consume AI-generated content, but to develop enough AI literacy to question what they are seeing, understand how these systems work and distinguish useful information from what he calls “AI slop”.
And there is another layer to that literacy:
cost.
AI can feel almost frictionless to the person typing into a screen.
But it isn’t free.
Inputs and outputs are processed as tokens. Those tokens require computing infrastructure. Infrastructure requires energy and resources.
For businesses, that creates an economic cost.
At scale, it creates an environmental one too.
That means responsible AI adoption cannot simply ask:
Can this be automated?
It also needs to ask:
Should it be?
What does it cost?
What information are we handing over?
What value are we getting back?
Who is accountable for the consequences?
Human technology is still a human responsibility
One of the phrases associated with Esteban’s approach is that technology should be human, ethical and bold.
But during our conversation, an important distinction emerged.
A machine is not human.
Behind even the most convincing conversational interface are mathematics, models and algorithms.
The humanity comes from somewhere else.
It comes from the choices we make when designing the system.
The limitations we put around it.
The communities we involve.
The education we provide.
The problems we choose to solve.
And the things we decide we will not build.
When I asked who should be responsible when AI causes harm — the builder, designer or user — Esteban’s answer was simple:
All of us.
And perhaps that is also the more useful way to think about the future of artificial intelligence.
Not as something being invented somewhere else by a small number of technology companies.
But as a capability increasingly entering the hands of ordinary people, organisations and communities.
Which means responsibility is spreading too.
What happens when technology meets intention?
Later in the conversation, Esteban described examples of technology being developed in response to human need — tools intended to connect people and information during emergencies, alongside an intelligent drone concept designed to help rescue teams locate missing people around Ireland’s coastline.
The significance wasn’t simply what the technology could do.
It was the speed with which people could move from seeing a problem to attempting a solution.
We can now build things at speeds that previously weren’t possible.
But we still need good intention behind what we construct.
And this is where the idea of an Agent of Change becomes particularly relevant.
Esteban described his own motivation very simply: how can I help others?
That mindset extends beyond technology.
It is about seeing a skill, platform, network or area of knowledge and asking how it can be used in service of something bigger than the technology itself.
Not simply:
Can I create this?
But:
Will creating it make something better?
Perhaps that is the real AI opportunity
Not artificial intelligence for artificial intelligence’s sake.
But technology that gives more people the ability to act.
More communities the ability to solve problems.
More small businesses the ability to build.
More young people the confidence to understand the systems shaping their lives.
And more organisations the ability to turn knowledge into meaningful action.
Because an Agent of Change is not simply someone who understands what comes next.
It is someone who helps other people participate in creating it.
And perhaps the most important question surrounding AI is therefore not:
What will artificial intelligence do to our future?
It is:
What kind of future will we choose to build with it?
Listen to the full conversation with Esteban Rocha Rodriguez on Conversations with Agents of Change.
Learn more about Esteban’s work at Rathunas Consultancy
Read his post about Northern Ireland’s first Claude Code meetup
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