From Application Engineer to solutions builder

My first job in this world was installing Inventor and answering support tickets. A few weeks ago I presented my own AI agent on an Autodesk University stage in Las Vegas. Between those two points there are years of work, a couple of turns that at the time looked like unnecessary risks, and a pattern that took me far too long to see.

IAC: the same problem from four chairs

At IAC, Ingeniería Asistida por Computador, I joined as an Application Engineer. The job was pure tech: implement, configure, train, solve. Over the years I moved to Key Account Manager, then Central Commercial Director, then Commercial Innovation and Services Manager.

Seen from outside it looks like drifting away from the technical side. Seen from inside it was the opposite: every chair showed me the same problem under a different light. The engineer sees an installation that fails. The salesperson sees a customer who does not renew. The manager sees a margin that does not close. It is the same story told by different people, and whoever can listen to all three versions at once has an advantage no single role provides.

asistIA and Avant Leap: building instead of opining

When AI agents stopped being a promise and started being a tool, the next step was clear: I founded asistIA to lead agent development, not to give talks about it. The rule was to build. If an idea did not end up as working software inside a real product, it did not count.

That road led me to Avant Leap, where I am now a Senior Consultant, AI Solutions. There we built VaultPilot, the native agent for Autodesk Vault, and the rest of the work I share on this blog: automation inside Inventor, AutoCAD and Forma, with and without AI.

Closing the loop on a stage

In September I defended session MFG3731, Vault on Autopilot, at Autodesk University 2026. A 60 minute Technical Deep Dive on automating PDM with agents without putting data at risk. The support engineer from years ago would not have imagined that stage, but the truth is that everything I said there I learned in those four chairs: the technical rigor of support, the listening of sales, the business judgment of management.

Along the way I completed a double MBA, at Universidad Santo Tomás and EUDE Business School. It helped, above all, to put formal language on what the chairs had already taught me.

Solutions builder is not a decorative title: it is a working criterion. It means the question is never which technology I want to use, but which problem needs solving. Sometimes the answer is an AI agent with nine layers of defense. Sometimes it is a classic add-in that exports the Content Center to Excel without a single line of AI. The judgment to choose comes from having sat in the four chairs, not from the fashion of the moment.

If this story leaves one thing, it is this: I did not change careers. I changed the tool I use to solve the same problem as always, engineering people losing hours to tasks that do not deserve them. First it was well implemented software. Then a well built commercial channel. Today it is agents.