Why the head of engineering is your most important change agent

Engineering will be the first function in almost every large organisation to run AI-native. It is happening now. Marketing, legal, finance and operations are nowhere near it.

That creates a problem and an opportunity, and they are the same thing.

The problem: an AI-native engineering function cannot work with a traditional marketing or legal function the old way. The relationships change. The artifacts change. Engineering will need shared, machine-readable contracts with every function it touches, and it will need those functions to produce inputs at a pace and in a form they have never been asked for.

The opportunity: someone has to show the rest of the business what AI-native looks like. The engineering leader is the only person who has done it.

I am in leadership team meetings where I ask the engineering leader to explain to their peers how they now want to work with them. It is a different conversation every time. Nobody has had it before.

For the CEO, the decision is whether to treat the engineering transformation as an IT project or as the pilot for the whole company. Treat it as the pilot, and the technology leader who runs it becomes your strongest internal candidate for the operating roles that follow.

Propel works with technology leaders on exactly this: getting the engine room running AI-native first, then taking the pattern to the rest of the organisation.

If you want to understand how to spread AI-native ways of working from your engineering team into all of the other functions of your business, come and have a chat with us at Propel.