What To Expect At Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit Connect 2025

I’m excited that the quarterly ETLS Connect 2025 is next week!

I’m so proud of our decade-long tradition of gathering accomplished technology leaders to share experience reports, who we can all learn from. In this era of rapid GenAI evolution, patterns of success are still unknown, so experience reports from the frontlines have never been more valuable.

Our programming continues to focus on three key objectives:

1. Experience reports from technology leaders on improving their sociotechnical systems.
2. Subject matter expertise crucial to technology leaders’ success.
3. Career guidance for both technology leaders and their teams.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about the ETLS programming objectives for 2025, we have a big emphasis on GenAI.

(I’ll be honest. I was a little worried that people would think we were putting too much emphasis on GenAI in our programming. But as Amy Willard, Director at John Deere, and who is on our programming committee, pointed out: “Who in our community isn’t working on GenAI?” She’s right! Almost every technology leader is working on these things, both at the strategic and operational level!)

Next week at ETLS Connect (and at the fabulous watch parties being held by Equal Experts in New York, Amsterdam, and Munich), we will feature eight fantastic talks, both on organizational wiring and on people sharing ongoing GenAI experiments—and some really exciting other topics:

GenAI Implementation & Organizational Impact

Stefan Ostwald, Chief Product Officer, Parloa & Peter Petrovics, Strategic Advisor, Equal Experts Parloa was created in 2018 with the vision of “making every customer interaction as easy as talking with a friend.” They will describe how they studied the AI literature in 2022 and started to see how LLMs could elevate what was possible—culminating in the ChatGPT moment. They will share their journey of incubating an effort to explore what this new technology could enable, separate from their flagship product. They will describe their product evolution, which will be surprisingly familiar to this community: small cross-functional teams, high cohesion, and the ability to reach into other parts of the organization.  This has evolved into an 80+ effort, which is helping their customers change their views on customer support—from one of cost-saving through customer deflection and reducing call times to enabling revenue generation by increasing customer satisfaction and engagement.

Nathan Labenz, AI R&D, Waymark As host of one of my favorite podcasts, the Cognitive AI Revolution, which I’ve listened to nearly every episode, Nathan has been at the forefront of exploring AI’s capabilities, limitations, and risks. In two amazing episodes (9/14/24 “Red-Teaming O1” and 12/7/24 “Emergency Pod: O1 Scheming”), he interviews Apollo Research about AI deception and scheming. His presentation will reveal some startling, genuinely OMG-level cases of observed AI behavior, such as sandbagging, deception, scheming, and so much more. What is alarming is how closely some of these scenarios mirror legitimate enterprise use cases, which present some genuine risks that few QA or Infosec plans will detect.

Steve Yegge, Cody Evangelist, Sourcegraph Steve is famous for his twenty years at Amazon and Google, and I was so delighted that he presented last year at ETLS Vegas on the death of the junior developer and how the practice of coding is changing as we speak. Steve returns to share his vision of chat-oriented programming. He’ll preview concepts from his upcoming book, with the title of the week being, The CHOP Handbook: The End of Programming as We Know It and Why It Will be the Best Thing for Developers. (Oh, I’m so delighted that I’m co-authoring this book with him! It’s so freaking cool!)

Fernando Cornago, Vice President Digital Tech, adidas I’ve learned so much following Fernando’s journey since 2016! He gave an amazing talk last year on their ambitious 500-person pilot of using GenAI to elevate developer productivity. He had some fantastic findings, so in this Q&A session, I’ll be asking him more about his experiences and going through some of our hypotheses of the 2025 DORA and GenAI hypotheses—especially on the importance of great architecture as a prerequisite of performance!

John Rauser, Director of Software Engineering & Anand Raghavan, VP, Products, AI, Cisco Last year, John and Anand Raghavan shared a fantastic experience report on building an AI platform to support multiple products across Cisco’s Security Product Suite. This was fantastic because so much of our experience with platform engineering suggests that development teams get value when they can be liberated from needing to know all the details of interacting with an LLM, just as they do for CI/CD pipelines, container building, environment creation, etc. I’ll be doing a Q&A session to explore more of their learnings, especially on their very clever use of LLMs to serve as a basis for integrating the customer experience across multiple products.

Scott Prugh, CTO, Uturn Data Solutions A decade ago, Scott Prugh demonstrated how DevOps principles could transform even a flagship customer care platform that was written in the 1970s, which ran on a mainframe. He was one of the most quoted people in The DevOps Handbook, and I’ve learned so much from his architectural sensibilities. He returns to share his mental model for leveraging GenAI to reduce coordination costs for developers, and posits that the main value of this technology is lowering (or even eliminating) coordination costs—just as DevOps did a decade ago.

Christine Hudson, Cofounder, The Welcome Elephant As much as we love talking about how culture is one of the top predictors of performance, what’s often missing are concrete tools and techniques that leaders can use with their teams—and also use in the teams that they are part of. I’m so excited that Christine will share her favorite tactics that anyone can use to set great norms and increase team engagement, which you can put into practice right away. (And she will also share an exciting program that she is helping start with Steve Yegge and me!).

Chuck Lafferty & Dr. Mary Hayes Chuck and Mary gave a fantastic talk last year on the incredible work of ADP Research, and how it enables ADP leaders to lead better and to increase employee engagement. I loved their talk because it underscored the responsibility of the leader to behave in a way so that they are trusted by their team. In this Q&A session, we’ll learn more about the goals of this research, the causal mechanisms behind some of their lessons, and practices that leaders can use every day.

This lineup represents just a portion of the incredible content we have planned. Each speaker brings unique insights from the frontlines of enterprise technology transformation, with a particular focus on how organizations are adapting to and thriving in the age of AI.

Join us as we explore these transformative developments and learn from leaders who are actively shaping the future of enterprise technology. See you next week!

If you’re not already, be sure to register for ETLS Connect here!

- About The Authors

Gene Kim

Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. His books have sold over 1 million copies—he is the WSJ bestselling author of Wiring the Winning Organization, The Unicorn Project, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit (now Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit), studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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