Every bank, hospital and energy network is being asked to modernise decades of infrastructure and adopt artificial intelligence at the same time. The people who can actually do both are rarer than the headlines suggest.

There is a gap in the technology industry that very few people talk about honestly. On one side sit the announcements, the AI strategies, the transformation roadmaps presented at conferences. On the other sits the far less glamorous work of making any of it function inside organisations that cannot afford to fail. Banks that clear millions of payments a day. Energy networks that keep the gas flowing. Hospitals and health plans that process claims for millions of people.