There’s a lot of talk about AI replacing engineers. But the real disruption isn’t the loss of roles — it’s the loss of old ways of working. When every engineer suddenly gains a 10× boost in output, it’s the culture, processes, and expectations around that engineer that break first.

This talk explores how AI is quietly pushing engineering teams into a new era: faster feedback loops, more experimentation, more autonomy, and completely different expectations of how work gets shaped, reviewed, and delivered. The teams that thrive won’t be the ones with the best models or the most automation — they’ll be the ones that rethink how they work together.

Drawing from real experience introducing AI tools and LLM-powered systems across engineering teams, I’ll walk through the cultural patterns that hold teams back, how to evolve rituals like code review, sprint planning, and RFC processes, and how to build trust when machines are contributing meaningfully to your codebase. We’ll dig into how expectations change for engineers, tech leads, and managers — and how leaders can create an environment where AI unlocks creativity rather than chaos.

This isn’t a talk about tools. It’s a talk about identity, habits, and what it means to lead an engineering organisation through one of the biggest cultural shifts since Agile.