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Engineering 2028: The AI maturity journey | Iain Bishop at CTO Craft Con 2026
AI maturity starts with rethinking how software is built, how teams are structured, and what the “senior” title really means in an AI era. Organisations that move beyond experimentation are willing to question their operating model, not just layer AI onto the way they’ve always worked.
Speaking to CTO Craft at the 2026 London conference, Damilah CEO Iain Bishop outlined the stages organisations move through on the path to AI maturity: from early experimentation, through to copilot mode, to full orchestration and agentic working. He shared what AI maturity means for team structure: why teams get smaller, why product teams start to outweigh engineering, and what the role of a senior engineer looks like now.
Iain draws on what Damilah is seeing directly with clients to describe what changes, what stays the same, and what leaders often get wrong.
The full interview covers:
- The stages of AI adoption, from experimentation to a full agentic model
- What separates companies experimenting with AI from those approaching real maturity
- The mindset shifts leaders need to make, including rethinking how teams are structured
- What “senior” means for engineers in an AI era
- How AI is reshaping the balance between product, engineering and the business
This conversation builds on our Engineering 2028: Leading Human + AI Teams Responsibly report, produced jointly by Damilah and CTO Craft.
It has also formed the foundation of the CTO Craft Leadership Masterclass on Engineering in 2028, where Iain presented and expanded on the findings in person earlier this year. We summarised the key takeaways from that panel discussion in our post-event blog here.
If you are working through any of these questions in your own organisation and would like to talk through practical next steps, get in touch. We work with technology leaders at every stage of the AI maturity journey.