Keynote – AI and Engineering: Closing the Gap Between Expectations and Reality

Social media is filled with stories of developers building six-figure businesses overnight using AI, yet most real-world teams only see a 5–10% productivity boost—what’s really happening beneath the hype?

  • The great divide — while individual developers report 5-10x gains and AI writes up to 90% of the code, enterprise teams struggle to achieve even 10% productivity improvements. Why is that? We’ll explore it through stories and ideas.
  • AI workflows in the SDLC — while vibe coding gets all the headlines, AI is quietly infiltrating all the steps of the dev process, which is changing workflows more profoundly than pure throughput gains. We’ll go through the latest emerging patterns.
  • Organisational evolution — we’ll look at how startups and forward-looking teams are reshaping their structures for AI leverage—reducing layers, empowering full-stack engineers, and following “Conway’s Law for AI”, where organisational design determines AI effectiveness. 

Luca Rossi, Founder, Refactoring