Dive Brief:
- The size and structure of software engineering teams will likely change in the next three years, according to research from Gartner published Tuesday. By 2029, 60% of organizations said they will adopt smaller software engineering teams, compared with 15% this year.
- AI adoption has been changing the role and responsibilities of engineers, and as agents handle more routine technical tasks, engineers have more time to focus on problem-solving, Gartner found. This change will lead organizations to reorganize engineering departments into smaller teams, often comprised of four or five members.
- Three-quarters of software engineering leaders expect their headcounts to remain the same or grow, according to the analyst firm. The new model isn’t a cost-saving tactic, Aliyah Camacho, principal analyst at Gartner, said in an email to CIO Dive. “It’s a restructuring of teams to best take advantage of AI and human expertise,” she said.
Dive Insight:
The software engineering profession is experiencing an overhaul as more teams adopt AI agents, responsibilities shift toward managing AI outcomes and the price of AI coding rivals the cost of human workers.
Adopting AI into engineering workflows has become the default. Under the new operating model, engineering responsibilities have expanded to include scrutinizing code quality and security, taking accountability for downstream outcomes, and making judgment calls about when to trust Al and when to override it, a May report conducted by software platform Harness found.
As the traditional responsibilities of software engineering roles fluctuate, organizations might find more success by breaking employees into smaller groups, Gartner’s report said. These smaller groups likely include skilled engineers such as a product manager, a user experience or agent experience designer, and at least one AI-native software engineer.
In this structure, each team member manages a variety of responsibilities including understanding business goals, managing AI agents and product design. The size of a successful team will likely change based on the project or goals they’re working on, but it’s important they stay nimble, while being big enough to promote a diversity of ideas, Camacho said.
“Due to AI-driven compression of roles and competencies, software engineers are becoming ‘product engineers,’ freeing product managers to focus on the product vision and feature roadmap of the future rather than feature implementation details,” Camacho said.
She emphasized that Gartner is not predicting the restructuring should cause job losses within organizations. In fact, slowing junior-level hiring could lead to talent pitfalls for organizations over time, hindering knowledge transfer, restructuring internal talent pipelines and limiting recruitment to more expensive and competitive senior roles, Camacho said.
“AI is reshaping software engineering — not by replacing developers, but by creating a surge in demand for intelligent applications and new engineering roles,” Camacho said.
