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.”
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.”