Culture & Methods Trends 2026: The Human Side of AI Engineering

We've got a variety of topics we wanna touch on, but the first one, and it's impossible to talk about teams and organizations without touching on AI today, so I'm gonna do a, a quick round robin and ask people what is the biggest trend that you are seeing or thing that you would want our audience to consider when looking at the human aspects of software engineering today? And Vanessa, I'll start with you.

Thanks, Shane.

Big topic here.

So I think one of the things I would like people to think about the most these days is with what level of maturity and to what extent they want to integrate AI.

I think we're all excited about it, and it's nice that peop- everybody's jumping on the wagon and trying to do as much as they can.

I think it's very important to start considering what are the risks and to what extent, what is appropriate in what circumstance for which software, for which company, and for which group of people, which is conversations we used to have in the past, and I feel that these days is more everything or nothing in the AI space.

So how do we move away from that everything or nothing?

It's more how do we apply the same reasoning that we have used in the past.

You know, what's the risk? What's the impact? What's the specific circumstances of level of maturity, let's call it, not necessarily with a positive connotation in all cases, for each piece of software? So there is easier pieces of software or less low risk pieces of software that would require more attention, more human in the loop, less human in the loop.

So there's a different degree, and I feel that these days we're just saying AI everywhere in everything, while we should just understand how much would be a catalyst for improvement and how much wouldn't.

Cool.

So frameworks of maturity for IE acquisition, I would say.

Frameworks of maturity.

And jumping across, Ben, what are your thoughts? What is the thing that people should be thinking about today?

I think that the thing to think about is that collaboration patterns are changing in teams, between teams, between organizations, and one key aspect that enables this kind of collaboration is psychological safety combined with transparency.

So- How are people communicating with each other? Do they feel safe enough to raise any issues that are there, any problems that they see, but also any o-opportunities that pass by? I think that's where the adoption of AI having the right impact.

And I think it's also tied to, to the maturity, I would even say more capability than maturity.

Are people capable enough to work with AI but still feel safe enough to work together and to raise any issues in there? That's the kind of key aspect for me, how that is changing the way that teams work.

But haven't we been tackling psychological safety since, oh, at least twenty fourteen?

[laughs] We've been tackling it a long time, and I, I've seen a lot of positive developments in the area of psychological safety.

I think it got a dip with COVID, actually, because people went back to their security, to their personal security in there.

I think also with recent global developments in there, this is again challenging the aspect of psychological safety.

There's nothing we can change about that, but it's still making it an important topic.

We're not there yet.

Thank you.