AI is rapidly transforming software development, shifting the bottleneck from engineering execution to determining what products to build. 

In fact, 84% of developers use AI and 52% agree that AI tools and AI agents have had a positive effect on their productivity, according to a March report from IT service provider StackOverflow.

At expense management service provider Extend, for example, at a recent internal hackathon, just one team of three employees was able to build a functional invoice-processing system in the 48-hour time limit— with AI generating more than 160,000 lines of code, Chief Executive Andrew Jamison told FinAi News. The system ingests invoices, extracts key data, routes approval, and integrates with accounting software. 

“That kind of output would have taken a full team weeks or months before,” Jamison said. “Now, small teams can replicate entire product features in days.” 

The benefits go beyond speed, he said. 

Jamison noted that teams are shrinking — teams of eight software developers have been cut to three or four — yet delivering more output.  

Productivity is compounded when combined with AI-assisted development, doubling both team efficiency and organizational velocity, he said. 

Extend uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude for its gen AI needs, Jamison said. 

AI-driven software development at Glia 

AI-driven communications service provider Glia co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Justin DiPietro has seen a similar shift, emphasizing that faster coding changes where effort is spent. 

“The coding — the brick-laying — has gone not to zero, but practically to zero,” DiPietro said. “The bottleneck moves up the stack into what to build and why.” 

As AI automates implementation and parts of testing and design, companies are now spending three to four times more effort on defining requirements than writing code, DiPietro said, an inversion of traditional software development workflows. 

Other FIs that use AI for software development and report increased productivity are: 

• ING reports a 20% jump in productivity; 

• American Express reports a 10% increase in productivity; and 

• Citizens Bank reports an 80% increase in productivity in code conversion processes. 

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