Nine minutes: the time it took Jesús Guzmán — better known as Brujería Tech — to pull an espresso-machine cappuccino was enough to build a complete website with the help of artificial intelligence.
Using everyday language instead of conventional code — a practice known as vibe coding — Jesús pulled off in nine minutes what used to take weeks or months of specialized programming. That kind of speed is more and more common now. What was startling was that it put a number on my frustration.
That frustration started in a meeting with the digital team about improving our current website — one I had already designed and submitted as an HTML proposal hosted on GitHub, ready to deploy. The answer was no: we had to wait out the five-plus months the team had already planned to rebuild the site, a timeline that came with a fairly generous budget.
Wanting to understand the situation better, I went digging for the reasons. It's true there are technical and compliance processes I'm not aware of, but the site was already 90% designed — so what was stopping us from using their help to take it to 100%, with the corporate look and ready to run? The answer was no, because they use a different system. Unsatisfied, I asked to talk to the developers. All I needed was to understand their deliverable, to see whether we could do something to shorten the timeline, adapt what we already had, and launch soon. Again, the answer was no — but this time the argument was that the plan had already been approved by the CEO, along with the budget, so, no.
The response left me in shock. It's the kind of thing I might expect working in government, in a very traditional institution, something like that — but in a company? Especially a company chasing efficiency? A company that is even encouraging the use of AI, paying for Copilot licenses and training courses for its people?
That's where those nine minutes come in. Today it's nine minutes; in two months it will probably be five. But it takes far, far longer to wear down people's insecurities, their barriers, the mental cobwebs. This is the great paradox of AI: it lets people with no technical background question processes that used to be taken for granted. That democratization of knowledge carries its risks — it can feed a false sense of expertise and dismiss the value of specialized fields. But it's also an invaluable chance to make the organization sharper and to raise everyone's game.
This is where soft skills take on critical importance — and not exactly in the "getting along with your colleagues" sense. In the age of AI, these skills have to be aimed at objectivity, curiosity, and the ability to understand new logics without imposing obsolete criteria. Unfortunately, that's the very thing companies cultivate least.
Organizations love to project an image of technological vanguard. But are their leaders actually ready for AI? Are they willing to have their authority questioned with evidence, and to build together, breaking down the hierarchical silos?
I'm not a programmer like Jesús; he understands the system in ways I don't. But his knowledge should be the bridge to verify, improve, and innovate on what technology now lets us prototype so quickly. AI's real challenge is cultural, not technical. It requires the expert to see the user's speed as a chance to rise, not a threat of replacement.
Leaders need to understand that these tools are built to amplify collective work. The fear of being displaced is natural, but technology won't stop advancing. What can evolve is our capacity to adapt — to stop fearing the automation of our current tasks and become the experts who steer that technological power.
Nine minutes were enough to create a website. Adapting to this new reality — shedding the ego and the insecurities to put collective capability first — seems to take more than six months and thousands of euros. I'm not sure the human team will be ready for that transformation. The website, without a doubt, could be ready in a fraction of the time.