TechLead Conf London 2025: Adopting AI in Orgs Edition

Technical leaders face the challenge of balancing innovation with governance when rolling out AI assistants across teams. This session offers a tactical view on operationalizing AI in software development - covering success metrics, telemetry, feedback loops, and enterprise guardrails. Based on the GitHub Well-Architected framework and broadened to general-purpose AI tools, we’ll explore how to create visibility into usage, address security and compliance risks, and ensure that AI-powered development doesn’t just happen - it scales with intent and trust. A must-attend for those building the platforms and policies of tomorrow’s engineering organizations.

Gregor will be sharing both positive and negative trends that he's seeing, speaking with many engineering leaders across the industry. He'll also share how the role of engineering leaders is evolving, and tips on what to do to be a successful engineering leader in the age of AI.

Our world runs on IT built in the 80s and 90s by engineers who are now retiring. This is becoming very worrying for corporates who have critical systems running on legacy code that only a handful of people still understand.That's where GenAI arrives. With its almost magical transpilation abilities, it is the innovation that was needed to kickstart the legacy modernisations that had been postponed for too long.Having worked on critical modernisations for more than 15 years, I jumped on the opportunity to experiment with how LLMs can accelerate complex migration projects. I will share the concrete experience we have accumulated on a wide range of stacks (Swift->React-Native, Eclipse RCP -> Spring Boot, Java 1.6 Spring -> Java 21 Spring Boot, PHP ZF1 -> Symfony 7), cover both the good surprises and the limitations that we uncovered, and share our current playbook to best leverage AI when migrating a legacy system.

Agent demos are shiny; daily use is messy. In this talk I’ll share a handful of short, honest stories from shipping agent workflows with real teams—what we tried, how people reacted, what surprised us, and what we changed the next day. Rather than theory, you’ll hear concrete moments (wins, faceplants, near-misses) and the practical learnings that emerged. You’ll leave with clear and battle-tested principles that encompass the new world we are all approaching.

As AI transforms software development, teams face a critical choice: lead the change, or risk being left behind! At Typeform, we're proactively encouraging the use of AI tools, and helping everyone level-up their AI proficiency.This means lots of things including the flexibility to try different tools, democratising access to (but controlling our expenditure on) LLMs, and ensuring we're hiring the next generation of engineers who have AI as part of their DNA.In this talk, I'll provide some practical examples of how we're achieving these things at Typeform, as well as how we're enhancing the way we collaborate with people outside of engineering using AI tools.I'll share real examples using AWS Bedrock and MCP servers, plus hard-won lessons from our journey. If your team is on the path to AI transformation, this talk will give you some practical strategies for making it a success.

In early 2025, a team of skilled engineers was given a formidable challenge: go from a traditional software engineering skillset to launching a production-grade, agentic AI insurance solution in just 16 weeks. This talk tells the story of that journey. It will dive into the practical, human-centric playbook developed for rapid upskilling in the age of AI. The presenter, Tim Makin, will share how his team built not just an "agentic engine room" on AWS Bedrock and a suite of collaborator agents, but also a culture of intense, continuous learning and psychological safety. Attendees will leave with a replicable framework for transforming their own teams into AI-native powerhouses.

At Capital on Tap, the AI team began outside Engineering, and has had a contentious time integrating the team into our existing Engineering structure - with an unclear mandate, pressure to turn prototypes into production systems. Most organisations have prototypes; far fewer have safe, reliable customer-facing AI products. This talk is a practitioner’s playbook for AI in organisations and measuring AI impact and ROI in a regulated UK fintech context—focused on operating model, gates, product-readiness, and post-launch measurement tied to operational outcomes.

When every employee can create AI agents, innovation stops being a department and starts being a culture. True innovation is rarely the result of a single spark – it’s the product of an environment where everyone is equipped and empowered to contribute ideas. At Semble, I’ve spearheaded the adoption and customisation of Dust, turning it into an internal AI platform that empowers every employee to create, test and deploy agents, no technical background required.  By lowering the barriers to experimentation and implementation, we’ve ensured that innovation is not confined to the technical elite. Instead, it becomes a lived, daily experience for every employee. Drawing from real-world results at Semble, this talk will offer actionable insights for tech leaders looking to unlock the creative potential of their teams. You'll learn how to shift from top-down innovation to a participatory model, why internal change management is as critical as technical excellence and how to make every employee a champion of transformation. Join me to discover how empowering people at every level can redefine what’s possible for your product, your culture and your company’s future.  (Disclosure: this synopsis was written by one of those said agents.)