What to Expect at the 2025 Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit

Last year, we had the best programming in our ten-year history of running the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit—much of it was due to the “Ultimate GenAI Learning Day,” where we all learned how GenAI is upending not just technology but nearly every aspect of the enterprise.

This year is going to be even better. So much of the programming is about how technology leaders are using GenAI to elevate developer productivity and unlock value across the enterprise. Astonishingly, we also have technology leaders from the frontier AI labs, who demonstrate that many challenges they face (such as developer productivity) have uncanny similarities to our own.

Tech Leadership Amid AI

Here are some of the AI talks I’m most excited about:

• Andrew Glover, Director of Dev Productivity, OpenAI: Formerly part of the Dev Productivity team at Netflix, Andrew is now helping elevate developer productivity at a massive scale at OpenAI. He will share some of their successes and how they’ve observed some engineers getting massive gains in productivity using agentic coding tools such as Codex. He will share their own recent challenges around increasing developer adoption of AI tooling, and what they’re doing about it. Among the programming committee, we talked about how, once again, the main challenges are organizational and cultural, not merely technical.
  
• Bruno Passos, Group Product Manager, Developer Experience, Booking.com, and Laura Tacho, CTO, DX: Booking.com is the world’s largest travel agency, with over 3,000 developers. Bruno’s mission is to eliminate developer roadblocks so they can do their best work. Over the past year, Bruno has been heavily involved in Booking.com’s GenAI innovation efforts within engineering. He will share some of the challenges they are attempting to solve, including tons of dead code behind feature flags and legacy code modernization, as well as the strategies they’re using to overcome them. He and Laura will describe the rigorous work they are doing to measure any productivity gains and will also share their early successes and lessons learned.
  
• Dr. Daniel Rock, Wharton School and CTO, WorkHelix: Dr. Rock was part of the famous 2021 “OpenAI Jobs Report” and was an incredible help to Steve Yegge and me as we worked on our Vibe Coding book. He will be sharing what he has learned about the impacts of AI on technology organizations and teaching us how vibe coding will likely reshape our organizations. He will discuss how we can massively increase option value—not just in what you can build, but in how quickly you can pivot when circumstances change. He will be co-presenting with a technology leader on their early attempts to measure the business value that AI can create for their organizations.
  
• Timothy Howard, Deputy Director, Major Projects, Cross-Cutting Technical Services, with Shelly Parker, Equal Experts: This is a fantastic talk about the democratization of software development at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (basically, everything that involves food, water, and air). Timothy shares how digital services previously cost tens of millions of dollars. He and his team have done experiments showing how AI can help develop these types of services in a week, moving the bottleneck back into the government agencies. The exciting prospect: Services that could never afford digital transformation are suddenly within reach. He will share his success and challenges that still remain.
  
• Amy Willard, Global IT Director – Enterprise Core Platforms & Operations, Strategy & Transformation; Adam Brunner, Principal Software Engineer and Group Product Manager for Developer Advocacy, John Deere: Amy is committed to using AI to increase the productivity of not just developers, but also all knowledge workers at John Deere. She and Adam have been doing exciting pilots with rigorous measurement to find how AI can help individuals and teams, including using vibe coding to enable teams to build things outside the traditional development model. Amy is one of the best technology leaders I’ve met in my career, and I can’t wait for her and Adam to share what they’ve achieved in the last year.

• David Rice, Senior Vice President, Product & Engineering at Cox Automotive Inc., and Stephen Fishman, Boomi and coauthor of Unbundling the Enterprise: In this presentation, David will talk about how technology leaders need to up their game in this age of AI or face incredible penalties. Consider hiring freezes: If you haven’t adequately protected your most important initiatives (like AI), freezing hiring due to economic uncertainty will deprive you of the most essential options you need. Instead of blanket hiring freezes, smart companies will pare down Horizon-1 projects to make room for Horizon-2 and Horizon-3 initiatives, especially around AI talent acquisition. David and Stephen explore more provocative questions, including: What happens when the cost of software creation approaches zero? Do we still need MVPs? How does it change the whole rationale of using Lean Startup methodologies?
  
• Andy Domeier, Senior Director of Technology, SPS Commerce, with Scott Brons, Principal Engineer for AI, SPS Commerce: Among other things, Andy owns the developer platforms for SPS Commerce. Together with Scott, they are building AI agents for groups across the entire enterprise, including support, sales, and engineering. One success story: SPS Commerce engineering must often interface with their customers’ complex ERP systems, and would often be blocked on a senior engineer with the expertise required to start work (i.e., a Brent!). Agentic systems help engineers make that knowledge more broadly available, enabling teams to work more autonomously. Another compelling part of this story: Scott will describe how he went from management to being an individual contributor, why he did it, and why he’s finding it so rewarding. This is a fantastic story about how SPS is using lessons from platform engineering to deliver AI capabilities—the same playbook, applied to a new domain.
  
• George Proorocu, IT OPS Manager – Cybersecurity & Fraud, ING Bank: As part of the information security group at ING Bank, George has been researching the new threat vectors that are emerging. He will teach us about what he’s learned in the last year since he last presented. These include adversaries creating fake employees who are hired for remote positions for the purposes of conducting long-term reconnaissance and credential theft, and executive impersonation services—need a fake CEO, CFO, and Controller for your Ocean’s 11-type scam? There are services for that! This is not only entertaining, but also a sobering take on the new risks for people employing technology talent.

• Dr. Matt Beane, Author of The Skill Code and CEO, SkillBench: Dr. Beane is another person who was instrumental in helping Steve and me complete Vibe Coding. He spent over a decade studying the impacts of automation on the workforce, and he will teach us about topics that every leader is discussing (sometimes quietly): How AI impacts the workforce, talent management, and so much more. What I found so insightful is that his research showed that “the jankier the technology, the more you need operational glue.” This reveals why junior people have so often been overlooked by management in previous automation revolutions. Lessons abound. He will also head off the dreaded question that leaders are receiving: “How many people can I cut after we adopt all this AI?”

Tech Leadership Beyond AI

Of course, there is more to technology leadership than AI. Here are some of the fantastic talks we have in store for you, showing how technology leaders can deliver value sooner, safer, and happier!

• Brent Koren, Manager, Operational Excellence, Freeport-McMoRan; Amy Briggs, Lead Enterprise Product Owner, Freeport-McMoRan: Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is one of the world’s largest publicly traded copper producers, based in Phoenix, Arizona. The world’s demand for copper will likely increase by 30x in the next 20 years, and supply is barely able to keep up with demand. Brent will share how technology is transforming one of their largest copper mining operations. He and Amy will describe how they were able to take over the technology projects from an external consultancy and enable their internal colleagues to do the work far more easily and well. They will share some of their successes to date and some of their aspirations. This is such an amazing talk because of how important their industry is, and how software enables productivity revolutions outside of technology organizations.
  
• Emily Rosengren, Sr Director – Product Engineering, Grainger; Lucas Hinz, VP and Group Product Manager, Grainge: This is the amazing story of the KeepStock on-site vending machines to enable organizations to keep materials available for use. Emily and Lucas will describe how they overcame critical challenges—disconnected COTS systems, siloed teams, and low trust between business and tech. What I love about their approach is the disciplined progression of engineering excellence over 6 years. They went from deploying once every 2 weeks to 80 deployments per week, while cutting major outages in half. They will describe how they did it and the techniques they used, including pair programming, TDD, CI/CD, event storming, and co-ownership of roadmaps with stakeholders.
  
• Sarah Ravenhill, Digital Service Manager, His Majesty’s Passport Office; Caitlin Smith, Technical Delivery Manager, Equal Experts: This is a fantastic experience report on how Sarah and Caitlin improved the Digital Application Processing at His Majesty’s Passport Office. They automated routine tasks, focusing humans where they can really add value, and handled a post-pandemic surge of 2 million extra applications per year. They nearly halved the average examination time from 20 minutes to 13 minutes for adult first-time applications—a 35% improvement while eliminating paper documentation entirely.
  
• Claire Hawthorne, VP of Product Delivery Operations and Head of Technical Product Management, Datavant, with Dr. Carliss Baldwin, Professor Emeritus, Harvard Business School: I genuinely believe optionality is a critical toolkit for leaders to help make good decisions. You’ll hear optionality mentioned in many of the other presentations. It explains why modularity is so powerful, and when the AI field is changing so quickly, optionality becomes a critical tool, as well. For instance, when the future is so unknowable, optionality teaches us to avoid making long-term plans. In this session, Claire will help distill the relevant and lifelong learnings of Dr. Carliss Baldwin, who pioneered the study of modularity (and was also Dr. Steve Spear’s advisor!), and help us better understand and apply it to problems we face every day, at all levels of the organization.
  

I’m so excited about the amazing stories and lessons that will be shared at the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit, September 23-25! Register here! I’m looking forward to seeing you all there!

- 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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