João Paulo Carvalho, Co-Founder and CEO of Quidgest, is a central figure at the forefront of technological innovation. Founded on May 10, 1988 by Cristina Marinhas, João Paulo Carvalho and Jorge Guerreiro, Quidgest remains at the forefront of using generative artificial intelligence to boost innovation and competitiveness in the business market. With more than 120 employees of eleven nationalities, the company maintains a startup spirit, even after 36 years of history.

Genio, developed since 1990, represents the essence of this innovation. Offering a revolutionary model-based and artificial intelligence approach to management software development, the Quidgest platform can produce easily evolving systems that are independent of generation frameworks, making it the platform of choice for complex products and time-sensitive projects.

In an exclusive interview with Empreendedor, João Paulo Carvalho shared the company's strategic vision and the next steps in Genio's evolution. He highlighted the importance of modeling and automating software generation as a sustainable competitive advantage, which effectively responds to the demand for quality solutions in the current digital revolution.

For João Paulo Carvalho, artificial intelligence is not a challenge, but rather a source of immense opportunities. He emphasized that Quidgest has been “surfing” this technological wave for decades and is well positioned to capitalize on the advantages offered by the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence.

Challenges and Opportunities with Generative AI

“We discovered and developed a sustainable competitive advantage, which the remaining market players, in a certain way, diminish and which results from the combination of modeling and automation of software generation”, he explains. “Not only is it a powerful combination, it also responds very well to a requirement of the current digital revolution: the availability of good solutions and excellent ‘programmers’”.

One of the innovations that Quidgest introduced was the concept of 'knowledge engineers', instead of programmers, highlights João Paulo Carvalho, highlighting the creative role that these professionals have in developing models, instead of code.

“All true innovations need to create their own concepts. Since programming is generally understood as writing code, we call solution creators at Genio knowledge engineers, because they don't write code, they create models. They translate the knowledge they have of reality into models.”

“Then, just press a button and Genio’s generative artificial intelligence infers all the code from the model”, he highlights.

Thus, for João Paulo Carvalho, Artificial Intelligence is not a challenge, but the generator of “immense opportunities”, with the advantage that Quidgest “has already been surfing this technology for decades”. “If, before the explosion of ChatGPT, in December 2022, we were seen as rare birds, today we are often the center of attention. For example, from investors.”

But the rapid development of this technology also allows Quidgest to add new functions and improve its platform, reducing development costs and increasing the effectiveness of the software. “The only real challenge is to be able to show that we have been surfing this wave for decades and everything we have learned during this long journey”, he highlights.

For years, Quidgest has been ahead of its time. Templates, code generation, artificial intelligence, or non-monolithic ERP were not mainstream. Reputable people either didn't understand these concepts or didn't believe it was possible to use them to create complex software solutions. But from the beginning, modeling and AI have always distinguished Genio from traditional low-code and no-code platforms.



The “Genius” of Quidgest: Revolutionizing Software Development

The name Genio is immediately associated with the new generative artificial intelligence (“Gen” AI) and has the same meaning. The “I” is related to “Input”, the ability to collect knowledge structured into models. And the “O” refers to “Output”, the ease of generating millions of pages of code.

“Our Genio was born 34 years ago, in Portugal, already with that name, already being artificial intelligence and already with this generative capacity. Ahead of its time, but always attentive to what is happening in the areas of software engineering, modeling and artificial intelligence, which it continually incorporates into its capabilities.”

With the recent boom around generative AI, driven by the success of ChatGPT, Quidgest is once again at the forefront of this innovation. This technological advance promises to revolutionize several industries and professions, driving the democratization of knowledge, the multiplication of innovation and increased productivity.

The success of the platform also boosted the expansion strategy, focused on nine lines of use of generative AI with Genio and on expanding to new markets in North America and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

“This strategy includes the global dissemination of the new paradigm of software development through generative AI and the offering of solutions created with this paradigm for sustainable development, for the government and for the most competitive companies in all sectors of activity, but with emphasis on health, banking and insurance, business services, consultancy, engineering and environment”, explains João Paulo Carvalho.

“Sometime in the future, this process will snowball and accelerate exponentially.”



Vision for the Future of Technology and Society

With a degree in Economics from the Instituto Superior de Economia (currently ISEG) and a Master in Business Sciences (Information Systems for Management) from the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (currently ISCTE-IUL), João Paulo Carvalho highlights a series of influences who marked his career, such as professors Mário Murteira, Simões Lopes, Augusto Mateus and Correia Jesuíno.

Among the books and authors, the Quidgest CEO's list is broader: “This is a long list. I would highlight Bertrand Russel’s ethics and intellectual honesty; the abstraction of the system concept of Von Bertalanffy, Russel Ackoff, Joel de Rosnay or Alain Resnais (yes, the director); the beauty of Eduard Codd's modeling; the quality practices of Deming, Juran and Taiichi Ohno; Mintzberg's organizational culture; the strategic thinking of Hamel and Prahalad, Kaplan and Norton; the software revolution explained by Watts S. Humphrey; the fascinating study of the brain, intelligence and human behavior by Carol S. Dweck (“Mindset”), David Rock (“Your Brain at Work”) and Uderzo and Goscinny (“Asterix the Ruckus”); and the entrepreneurship of Eric Ries (“Lean Startup”), Marty Cagan (“Inspired”) and Gene Kim (“The Phoenix Project”).”

For young entrepreneurs, João Paulo Carvalho advises identifying a competitive advantage and, through continuous learning, promoting autonomy in the team and prioritizing ethics and respect in business.

“Do what you like. Leave it to others to waste time figuring out whether you're working or having fun. Never stop learning. Promote autonomy and initiative in your team. Surround yourself with facilitators. Worry about the detail. Use stories to create your company culture. From the beginning, you are the guarantee of ethics, respect and justice in your company.”

“It is true that your company is unlikely to be the one with the most resources or financial resources on the market. Therefore, it identifies barriers to the entry of new competitors. Sometimes this barrier is as simple as others not believing you will succeed. But you need it,” he recommends.

As for the future, João Paulo Carvalho has an optimistic view. There are risks of increasing authoritarianism and nationalism, he warns, but he hopes that these will eventually be overcome by rationality, humanity and environmental preservation.

“I am structurally very optimistic. For example, I do not share the fear that so-called artificial intelligence – but which, in reality, is always human – will cause the extinction of the species. But I have to recognize that we are at a possible turning point. In a few years, will we identify 2022 as the year of the invasion of Ukraine or the emergence of ChatGPT?”, he asks.

“We are in a world shaken by the anachronism of authoritarian, imperialist, nationalist and fanatically religious temptations. We thought they had been forgotten in the middle of the last century, but they came back with a vengeance. Technology and AI are no strangers to this situation. Algorithms have created a schism of opinions in which factions in society are only exposed to people and content”, he highlights.

However, João Paulo Carvalho highlights that “The global response to the Covid-19 epidemic was a good example of global articulation. Humanity has been able to question almost everything without collapsing.” Just like the response to the climate crisis, “the discovery of the key to language, with the LLM, is a civilizational leap of which we must consider ourselves privileged to be contemporary.”