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AI ACCELERATED ENGINEERING

Unlock speed and innovation with AI accelerated engineering

By Slalom Build

In today’s ultra-competitive landscape, where agility and innovation are essential for success, the race to market has become more intense than ever. According to a Gartner survey, only 55% of product launches meet their scheduled timelines. Even more telling is the stark impact of postponing a product launch by more than six months, which can slash potential profits by 33%.

Now’s the time to rethink traditional approaches to creating products, not only to keep pace with industry changes but also to leapfrog standard practices.

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Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing product development

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing every stage of a product’s development, from ideation and creating an MVP, to design, release, and continuous refinement. AI is streamlining complex processes, drastically improving precision, and supercharging efficiency. It’s about more than just keeping up; artificial intelligence sets a new pace for innovation and market leadership.

Leading companies have recognized this technology’s positive impact on their business. For example, Volkswagen Group has established a specialized AI Lab to help speed the launch of new products. Nestlé has increased its pace of product development by 60% over the past six years with artificial intelligence.

Strategic advantages gained from AI accelerated product engineering

Here are a few examples of the strategic advantages and business outcomes that leading businesses are gaining from using AI within their product development:

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Significantly shorter and faster development cycles. AI is cutting development times by 50% for early adopters. To this end, Ford hopes AI will reduce the average time to develop an app from months to weeks—even days. Positive business outcomes from shorter and faster development cycles include speedier time-to-market for new features and products, a more rapid response to market demands and opportunities, enhanced agility and competitive edge, and the potential for increased market share and revenue growth.

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Improved code quality and consistency. 59% of tech leaders experienced increased costs due to refactoring. In addition, most organizations waste up to 42% of their development time on tech debt. An AI-code assist is welcome to help ensure fewer revisions, leading to a faster time to release. Additional impacts include a reduced risk of bugs and system failures, lower maintenance costs, and heightened customer satisfaction. Simplified maintenance and upgrades further reduce long-term operational costs and enhance product reliability.

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Reduced time to market. Unilever is using computational models to test millions of recipe combinations in seconds. The company can now design products that appeal to regional tastes with greater ease and speed. Experiments have demonstrated a 31% decrease in time to market for software development using AI technologies. Additional benefits include the ability to react faster to market trends and demands and an increased competitive edge thanks to introducing innovative products more rapidly. Faster launches and increased market penetration will contribute to boosting ROI.

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Greater efficiency and heightened agility. AI-accelerated engineering is driving increases between 30 to 50% in developer productivity. A technology leader noticed that using AI, his company "… saw programmers reduce ten-minute tasks, such as writing a small function, down to the 30 seconds it took to simply write out a comment that explains the function.”

Bringing AI into the mix sets the stage for innovation and improved processes, products, and services.  Adopters secure cost savings through increased operational efficiency and can drive revenue growth through enhanced offerings.

63%

of companies gained a 5% annual revenue increase from AI [1]

32%

claimed AI-driven cost decreases of 20%+ YoY [1]

50%

reduction in development time [2]

With assistance from AI, building a product is faster, easier, and cheaper. That’s why we are integrating this technology into our product engineering practice to accelerate our work and help our customers gain a competitive edge.

Learn how Slalom Build is using generative AI

Our AI accelerated product engineering methodology

Over the years, we’ve helped companies sustain value with the highest speed and quality across the product lifecycle using our proprietary adaptation of the Agile process for software development. This unique product engineering methodology is based on three phases designed to support every stage of the product creation journey. Regardless of whether a company is starting with a blank slate or optimizing a mature product at scale, the steps remain the same:

  1. Discovery: We work together to unearth the idea’s desirability, viability, and feasibility and define a minimum viable product.
  2. Delivery: Multi-disciplinary teams co-create the product, designing, building, and testing toward release.
  3. Enhancement & Operation: Taking a product-growth mindset, we help our customers engage in continuous improvement and optimization to ensure the product scales and grows sustainably and intelligently.

Adapting our product engineering process to include AI comes from our wish to help companies unleash innovation and realize value faster, propelling the speed at which new products are launched. We are seeing a 30% increase in team velocity, with projects costing 20-30% less.

AI accelerated engineering is also helping us ensure quality and security excellence and deliver more consistent outcomes across teams. Its use fosters collaborative innovation within our company and has become a mainstay technology in our Hackathons.

Here are several areas where we’ve embedded AI into our product engineering methodology.

Discovery

  • User journey research: AI-generated insights help us optimize user experiences, streamline workflows, and identify opportunities for innovation.
  • Technical architecture analysis and rapid prototyping: AI assists in optimizing system design, scalability, and modularity to enable seamless integration, adaptability, and futureproofing. We’re also leveraging AI to create robust rapid prototypes to validate and iterate quickly.
  • Backlog generation: AI-powered story identification and prioritization ensures efficient backlog management.

Delivery

  • AI-generated code: Prompts for Infrastructure as Code (IAC), PR reviews, Git Co-Pilot, ChatGPT, AWS Code Whisperer, Bard, OpenAI Codex, and other AI-assisted tools help us accelerate development and improve code quality.
  • Optimized resource allocation: AI-assisted decision-making supports prioritizing tasks and managing resources.
  • AI-powered testing: AI-driven test generation and automation enhances test coverage, reduces testing time, and ensures robust application performance.
  • Code review assistance: AI-driven analysis and recommendations help identify potential issues, improve code readability, and maintain coding standards
  • Security and compliance: AI-powered vulnerability scanning, threat detection, and enforcement of security best practices ensure we maintain a secure and compliant software environment.
  • Performance optimization: We’re harnessing AI-generated insights to identify bottlenecks and enhance application performance and scalability.

Enhancement & Operation

  • Code documentation: AI-assisted generation of accurate, up-to-date, and comprehensive documentation facilitates knowledge sharing and hand-off.
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Let’s Build

Are you looking for a way to navigate the future of product development with greater confidence and agility? Ready to embark on a path of innovation, setting new benchmarks for speed, efficiency, and creativity?

Whether it’s benefitting from our team’s use of AI to accelerate our work together or co-creating alongside us to make big gains fast and upskill your team, we’re here for you.

Contact us to discover how we can help you harness the full potential of AI accelerated engineering.

[1] Kiplinger, "Where AI Can Save Businesses the Most Money," 2023
[2] IDP, "The Artificial Intelligence Revolution in New-Product Development," 2023

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