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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Companies guide developers to make the most of AI.
- Hammer home the changes that automation brings.
- Create a flywheel of change to help people learn skills.
Industry experts recognize that AI is having a massive impact on software development. Research suggests that almost all developers now rely on AI tools, with many of the roles and responsibilities of these professionals at risk of being automated.
At technology specialist Harness’ recent Unscripted software development conference in London, five financial services business leaders explained how their firms are embracing AI. Here are their best-practice tips.
1. Encourage flexibility within guidelines
Dill Bath, AI technical lead at Allianz Global Investors, said his organization is using the Open Policy Agent (OPA) engine, which streamlines policy management across the stack to boost security and auditing capabilities.
“We’re codifying all the policies, not in a way to block our developers, but almost like a copilot to nudge them in the right direction,” he said. “We report and say, ‘Hey, you might be doing something wrong here.’ That approach is working well in our pilots, but we really want to push forward.”
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Bath said the firm wants to take a tech-first stance when new regulations arrive.
“It doesn’t work saying, ‘Hey, let’s add the regulation to the policy, let’s create a manual process, and then let’s check once a year whether people are doing this or not,” he said. “So, we’re going the other way around. When new regulations come in, we interpret them from a technology-first perspective.”
As part of this approach, Bath’s team is undertaking a cultural shift by embracing platform engineering and agile transformation. The aim is to increase the speed of delivery in a compliant manner.
“Ultimately, developers want autonomy, and that’s what we’re trying to bring to the table without compromising on the various standards we have.”
2. Focus on communication
Tony Phillips, engineering lead for DevOps services at Lloyds Banking Group, said his firm is running a program called Platform 3.0, which aims to modernize infrastructure and lay the groundwork for adopting AI.
He said the next step is to move beyond using AI to assist with coding and to boost all areas of the development process.
“We are creating productivity boosts in our developer community, but we are now looking at how we take that forward across the rest of the pipeline for what we ship.”
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Phillips recognized that introducing a culture of change in a big enterprise like Lloyds, which has 10,000 software engineers and developers, and multiple public and private infrastructures, is a significant task. He said focusing on communication is critical.
“Hammer home the changes that are happening, because the responses range from disbelief to a belief that change isn’t going to work right through to what we’re now seeing, which is the success. So, just landing the message has been one of the key challenges for us.”
He said the bank’s initial explorations into AI suggest that learning from experiences is an important best practice.
“There’s always a balance, because you’ve got to let people get hold of the technology, put it in their context of what they’re doing, and then understand what good looks like,” he said. “Then you’ve got to build the capacity for what gets fed back so that you can respond quickly.”
3. Take people on a journey
Bettina Topali, senior software engineering manager at Hargreaves Lansdown, said regulated financial services firms must innovate while ensuring that risk and security are manageable.
“We have to show progress, as standing still in a fast-paced landscape is also risky,” she said. “Our clients want sleek experiences and modern services. They don’t want to be on the phone with the helpdesk all day.”
She said the key to delivering innovation to customers in a risk-free manner is by embracing automation.
“We’ve embedded guardrails, such as automated testing, security scanning, and code coverage, that help us move faster within certain controls. By providing these blueprints to our engineers, we create more room for innovation.”
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Topali said executives must move beyond the buzzwords associated with emerging technology to unlock benefits from experimentation: “People are not going to believe your strategy by looking at a slide.”
She advised digital leaders to take people on a journey where they can see visible progress during innovative initiatives.
“If we guide them through these steps, then, hopefully, their disbelief will be replaced by people believing in the strategy,” she said. “New startups and fintechs are coming and are going to get a share of the market. With all these tools, we have an opportunity. So, let’s keep up the pace.”
4. Give regular feedback
Daniel Terry, deputy domain architect for developer experience at Nordic corporate bank SEB, said his organization is giving developers tools, such as GitHub and Copilot, to prepare them for a shift to agentic AI.
“We’re moving to a world where the developers are not the producers of the code and are more like the conductors of agents,” he said. “When we hit that stage, we also need to look at how we deal with challenges in the pipeline. How do we secure the output of thousands of lines of code that are generated in minutes instead of months or years?”
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Like others, Terry said governance is crucial. Give developers feedback when they take non-compliant actions — and AI might help with this process.
“We have a lot of different platforms and maybe haven’t created a dotted line between all the platforms,” he said. “AI might be the opportunity to do that and give developers the chance to do the right thing from the beginning.”
Terry also referred to the rise of vibe coding and suggested it shouldn’t be used by people who have just begun coding in an enterprise setting.
“Vibe coding is for someone who is senior and can prompt AI the right way,” he said. “You also need to go back to basics. Test your code to verify it’s doing what you want it to do, because AI generates so much code in so little time.”
5. Fight fire with fire
Aaron Gallimore, senior director of cloud engineering at Global Payments, said AI can make it easier for developers to use the broad range of tools at their disposal.
“Our big focus is making systems scalable, secure, and approved, so that our developers spend less time moving between the tooling,” he said.
While Gallimore said he’s eager for large language models to do some of the heavy lifting associated with development work, other IT professions can also benefit.
“Companies will give staff Copilot or the next big coding agent to developers and forget about the rest of the organization,” he said. “We’re trying to arm our information security and our audit teams to fight fire with fire.”
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Gallimore said the key to success is training IT professionals to use AI tools effectively.
“We’ve started to put in place university sessions where people come along and do short demos on things they’ve done in the last week,” he said. “You see that spark in people’s eyes where they think, ‘Oh, I can use this technology.’ It’s about building that flywheel of knowledge and cultural change.”
