My Story

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Heather Holmes | AI 4 Business

I was eighteen when I first walked into Gulf Canada in Calgary, Alberta.
The computer room was always cold.
In that way that all computer rooms were back then.
Raised flooring to hide the wiring. Cold air to keep the equipment from overheating.

It was a very large room. There were reel-to-reel tapes, spinning slow, like something breathing. There was always a hum in the air—not a metaphor, but the sound of machines alive and working.

The MVS and VM mainframe computers lived in this glass room.
We treated them like something sacred.
And maybe they were.

There were card readers too.
Great clunky beasts that devoured stacks of punched cards, each hole a whisper of code, instructions waiting to be carried out.

You didn’t just “boot up” back then.
You aligned things.
You waited.
You respected the process because the process was all there was.

The massive printers ran 24/7, spitting out reams of paper. Reports for every department. The rhythm of progress, on paper.

And then the terminals appeared on our desks.
Monitors, monochrome at first. The green flicker of a cursor against black.
It felt like magic, even then.
We didn’t call them PCs yet.
We didn’t know the world was about to change again.

But it did.
I watched the terminal become the personal computer.
The PC moved from being a tool to a necessity.
And then, one day, quietly, the internet arrived.

There was no announcement.
No parade.
Just the dull scratch of a modem dialing in.
The static sound that meant something was connecting.
We were connecting.
To each other.
To something bigger.

And everything got faster.

Years later, I stood in the hallways of Foothills Hospital.
The walls were beige. Softened by years of stories and sorrow.
I wasn’t there as a patient.
I was part of the team transitioning doctors from paper charts to online medical records.
I watched their hands—hands trained to write in looping scripts on patient charts, charts kept at the end of their beds—hover uncertainly over keyboards.
There was resistance.
There always is.

They told me,
“We are doctors. Not computer technicians.”
I’d heard it before.
Change doesn’t arrive all at once.
It sneaks in through the back door.
And before you know it, it’s the only thing left.

After that, I was at ISBM—Information Systems Business Machines.
Later bought out by IBM—International Business Machines.
The mainframes were different by then.
Now they were housed in massive computer rooms that served many companies at once.
It was the next phase.
The logical conclusion of everything that came before.

And still, one day, quietly, the internet arrived again.
No parade.
Just that same scratch of a modem.
The signal that we were connecting.
And everything got faster.

Later still, I found myself on the floor of the Alberta Stock Exchange.
It was noisy.
Traders shouted numbers. Waved their hands in the air like it was still the Wild West.
Then we brought in the systems.
We moved them from the chaos of the pit to quiet offices.
Connected by networks instead of hand signals.
Suddenly, trades didn’t need raised voices.
They needed clean code.
Clear data.
Quiet precision.

And the world shifted again.

Technology doesn’t just evolve.
It leaves things behind.
And if you’re not paying attention, it will leave you behind too.

I’ve spent my life watching this happen.
And now I help people do something about it.

Because AI isn’t coming.
It’s already here.
And this time, we’re not talking about card readers or beige walls.
We’re talking about decisions made in microseconds.
About businesses that grow while you sleep.
Because automation is doing the work.

But only if you let it.
Only if you’re ready to move forward.

That’s why I started AI 4 Business.
Because I’ve seen what happens when people stay stuck in the old ways.
And I’ve seen what’s possible when they embrace what’s next.