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Track Talk F1

5 surprising things I learned helping 300 techies to use AI

Shaun McGirr

09:00 - 09:45 CEST Friday 6th June

Helping a handful of software professionals adopt AI in their daily work is one thing, especially when they are already experimenting “under the desk.” Scaling to 300 professionals, from developers to testers to devops and product, in different teams working for different clients, is quite another challenge!

In this session, I’ll share key lessons from our AI adoption journey at DevOn, which started in 2023. My focus will be the unexpected barriers and breakthroughs we encountered, because just like AI, we have learned much more in the tougher parts of the journey, i.e. after we turned on copilots.

I will share these lessons as five “surprises” that are not earth-shattering looking back, but should help others avoid common mistakes and misconceptions, and get to meaningful value faster. Each surprise answers one of these questions, and at least one such question should be on your mind:

1. Which software professionals adopt AI more easily?

2. How much of which data do you need for AI to work well?

3. Where in the SDLC is the most additional value created with AI?

4. Why do individual gains aggregate (or not) to team-level improvements?

5. When will it feel like a “transformation” has taken place?

Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of the key factors that make AI adoption successful, the critical challenges to anticipate, and how to engage large teams in the transition.