Chief AI Officer program

Transcript

1. Building Software in the AI era our biggest (r)evolution yet? © ZENIKA 2026 All rights reserved - Proprietary & confidential 1
2. Who we are Asyraaf Ahmad Senior Consultant at Zenika • • • Tech Lead for AI transformation on a Govtech Project Teaching AI Driven Dev classes Fun fact: Has experience collecting mice brains © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential Michael Isvy Head of Engineering at Zenika • • • • Instructor for AI productivity courses Consulting and Audit on many projects 2 days a week: Computer Vision project for SG government Fun fact: started calisthenics one year ago. Never too old :) 2
3. Zenika • Software Engineering and Consulting • French company • 70+ people in Singapore, 600 people worldwide • Nowadays: mostly AI Transformations • Training, Consulting, Projects • Led by passion © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 3
4. Show of hands • Who works in IT? (Software Engineering, Product Management, Design…) • Who is a Software Engineer? • Which AI tool do you use? Claude, Copilot, Codex… © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 4
5. How we used to build software in 2022 © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 5
6. How we used to build software in 2022 © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 6
7. From Product Manager to Business stakeholders © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 7
8. And we would call ourselves Software craftsmen/women © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 8
9. We had our issues • Building Software was expensive • There was never enough software engineers • Product Managers were never satisfied with the team’s capacity © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 9
10. Still we lived in peace, until… © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 10
11. 2023 to 2026 • 2023: we started using ChatGPT for ShadowAI ◦ Copy/paste from ChatGPT into coding environment • 2024: AI came into the developer environment ◦ Much more precise • 2025: Claude Code by Anthropic • 2026: Huge model improvements © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 11
12. Real world stories Happened on real projects! © ZENIKA 2026 All rights reserved - Proprietary & confidential 12
13. 2023: Product Manager needs to validate an idea TODO: add calendar on wall (2023) © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 13
14. 2026: Product Manager needs to validate an idea © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential Claude Design demo 14
15. 2026: presenting prototype to a stakeholder • Before showing your prototype, we state expectations that a prototype is just a mockup • No backend, no database, etc • It is just part of the ideation process © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
16. Engineer's reality check • A mockup is not production software. • Auth, edge cases and security still take months to build. • AI builds the facade; engineers strengthen the foundation. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
17. A Facade: Prototype vs Production • Prototype Facade (1 Hour): Mock JSON data, unauthenticated routes, single browser execution, zero error recovery, zero test coverage. • Production Foundation (Weeks): Relational schema migrations, OIDC / RBAC, concurrency safety, audit logging, OpenTelemetry, regression tests. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
18. How we code in 2026 • AI agents scaffold the implementation. • Most boilerplate is generated, but human engineers direct the architecture. • We spend less time typing code and more time reading it. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
19. From writing code to reviewing code • Writing code got cheap; verifying code got critical. • Senior engineers move fast because they spot mistakes quickly. • Juniors face a steeper climb to build that intuition. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
20. The Junior Developer Dilemma • Senior Advantage: 10+ years of debugging gives seniors instant intuition during code review. • Junior Crisis: Junior engineers historically built intuition by writing mundane boilerplate. • The Apprenticeship Gap: If agents generate all boilerplate, the junior learning pathway breaks. • The Organizational Fix: Train junior engineers on test construction, system architecture, and failure diagnosis. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
21. Everybody is a product builder • PMs build working prototypes instead of writing long documents. • The boundary between designer and product manager is blurring. • Teams test real user flows in days instead of quarters. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
22. We still have bugs • AI writes code with confidence, including edge-case bugs. • We use AI to generate test suites and catch regressions early. • Automated tests are now the safety net for generated code. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
23. Demo takeaways • Faster coding creates feature inflation: Jevons paradox; we build things just because we can. • Product managers become the bottleneck when specs are unclear. • Teams need structured code generation, not blind acceptance of generated content. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
24. Demo takeaways • Jevons Paradox in Code: Cheaper code generation increases overall demand for software, risking feature bloat. • Feature Inflation: Organizations build unneeded features simply because code was cheap to generate. • The New Bottleneck: When engineers build in days, vague product specs become the blocker. • High-Velocity Teams: Require disciplined product boundaries and executable specifications. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
25. What's next: Privacy and local models • Enterprise data privacy is back in focus. • Running open models on-premise works today. • It protects company data, but requires real hardware budgets. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
26. What's next: Privacy and local models • Data Governance: Regulated public sector workloads cannot send citizen data to external commercial endpoints. • Open Weight Models: Models running on internal GPU clusters match commercial APIs on core coding tasks. • The Trade-Off: Public cloud APIs offer zero setup; sovereign private clusters require hardware budgets and MLOps maintenance. © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential
27. We are hiring!!! Software Engineers (Java/Python/Golang) Site Reliability Engineer Data Engineers Platform Engineer Full Stack Developers Business Analysts (DevOps) © ZENIKA 2026 | All rights reserved - Proprietary & Confidential 27
28. Thank you for attending! © ZENIKA 2026 All rights reserved - Proprietary & confidential 28