Published on the 10/06/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

More code, more speed, but value lags…

Plenty of organisations are celebrating early AI wins. Management consultancy Bain & Company has a blunt message: Enjoy it while it lasts.

“Successful pilots are satisfying, but real value comes from end-to-end transformation,” the company warns – and most companies haven’t achieved that yet.

“Optimising a single activity, such as code generation, test creation or requirements drafting, simply shifts bottlenecks elsewhere.”

The warning comes as AI reshapes the fundamentals of software development. What began as incremental productivity gains from coding assistants is accelerating into something far more structural: A full redesign of how software is conceived, built and deployed. According to Bain & Company, AI is ‘creating a seismic shift in software development’ moving organisations from isolated use cases toward an integrated, AI-native development model.

At the centre of the shift is the move from AI-assisted to AI-led development. Today’s tools may still sit alongside developers, but Bain & Company argues the trajectory is clear with AI systems increasingly capable of executing entire workflows, not just individual tasks.

“This evolution isn’t incremental; it is redefining what’s possible,” the report says, pointing to the emergence of hybrid human-agent teams delivering dramatically higher output.

The scale of that change is already filtering through to executive expectations. In 2024, executives were forecasting productivity gains of 20-30 percent from AI in software development. Now those expectations have ‘surged’ with many now anticipating improvements of ‘five times to 10 times’ over the next several years, with exponential gains no longer framed as theoretical, but instead apparently becoming the benchmark organisations are planning for. By late 2026 more than half of the global executives surveyed for the report expect more than half of their engineering efforts to be agent assisted. By around March 2027, that number hits around 90 percent.

But while speed is increasing, reports suggest value is not automatically following. Bain & Company’s report, which is based on surveys of global executives and market research conducted across 2025 and 2026, makes it clear that faster coding alone won’t deliver those outcomes – and some companies are missing out on many of the productivity benefits.

“It’s not enough for engineering teams to deliver code five times faster; business teams must generate demand at the same pace, and operations must match that speed to deploy, scale, and support solutions in production,” the report says. Writing code faster in isolation, or indeed optimising a single activity, such as code generation, test creation or requirements drafting, simply shifts bottlenecks elsewhere.

The State of Engineering Excellence 2026 report from software platform Harness, reinforces that point. It found 89 percent of engineering leaders say productivity has improved with AI coding tools, but 81 percent say developers are spending more time on manual code review. The self-reported impact is ‘overwhelmingly positive – but the cost is accumulating in places organisations aren’t watching,’ Harness says, with nearly a third of the work now ‘invisible work’ – reviewing code, fixing bugs and context switching between tools.

This dynamic aligns with Bain & Company’s argument that traditional software development thinking, where improvements are made within isolated phases, is no longer sufficient.

“Rolling out lots of pilots may also feel like success, but pilots don’t necessarily translate into real usage or business impact. Without new workflows, measurement, and guardrails, companies are likely to see adoption plateau and only minimal new value,” Bain & Company says.

Instead it points to the rise of an ‘integrated AI development lifecycle’ which breaks down the traditional divide between product development (defining what to build based on customer needs, market opportunity and strategic roadmaps) and software development – two streams of work that often occur across different teams.

“AI shatters these boundaries, and it can define requirements, generate code, test, and iterate all within a more continuous flow.

“Companies are moving toward an AI development life cycle in which AI is embedded across the entire process and product and engineering operate as a more integrated system rather than sequential steps. Instead of product development defining the objective and engineering building it, AI-enabled teams continuously define, build, test and refine together.

 It’s a process, Bain & Company says, that requires a redesign of organisational structure with tech teams making adjustments to all levels of their engineering operations, with developers moving from code executors to agent architects and new roles created.

“The shift to an AI-led development life cycle is not just a technology upgrade; it’s a full-system transformation that rewires how organisations build, operate, and compete. “Companies that move decisively, redesigning workflows, redefining roles, and anchoring on measurable outcomes, will capture disproportionate value.”