How AI Accelerates All, From Idea To Impact, For Technology Teams

Roby Baruch, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Tipalti.

​For decades, building software meant stitching specialists together. A product manager shaped the problem, defining why we were building something, what customer pain it solved and what success looked like. A designer converted that thinking into workflows, screenshots and interactions. Engineers brought it from concept to code, determining systems, APIs and use cases. QA offered the discipline to challenge assumptions and uphold quality.

Each role mattered. The PM delivered clarity, the designer championed empathy, the engineer enabled depth and QA brought rigor. For decades, this was the path to build great software, and the expertise of each role was required.

But that model is giving way to something new, with AI as a catalyst. This is the emergence of a new kind of contributor known as the Builder for product and engineering teams.

Collaboration has always been costly. As organizations grew, a simple customer-facing change could affect many service areas, teams and product roadmaps. At some point, building the feature’s difficulty was replaced by the effort required to coordinate all the work.

Companies answered that complexity with squads, working groups, ownership models and ongoing alignment meetings. Many of these structures were necessary. They helped teams manage scale, but they also slowed teams down. Every communication created delays, every dependency created risk and every unclear owner created friction. This became the hidden tax of scale, and most of us simply learned to pay it.

Then, generative AI stormed onto the scene in 2022 and grew its capabilities exponentially. In the early 2020s, it looked like AI would simply make each existing role faster. Designers could generate more ideas, engineers could write code faster and product managers could draft better specs. McKinsey reported in 2025 that more than 90% of software teams it surveyed use AI in their work, saving an average of six hours per week.

The significant knowledge gaps that used to block organizations are waning. Skill gaps that once required another specialist are becoming easier to cross. A motivated employee can now enter an unfamiliar codebase, comprehend a new domain, generate a prototype and reason through edge cases, especially with AI agents. McKinsey describes a progression in software development, from AI that completes lines of code to small teams steering systems of agents that deliver applications end to end, which the firm frames as up to 20 times the leverage of a traditional department.

This heralds the beginning of a new role in technology, the Builder.

The Builder is not a PM who codes, or an engineer who designs. They own a problem and move it toward a solution end-to-end, without needing to be elite in every discipline: enough product thinking to choose the right problem, enough design taste to shape the experience, enough technical understanding to work with systems and enough quality instinct to know where things might break.

In some organizations, they have agents around them—or at the very least, industry-standard AI tools. These agents and tools can explore the codebase, generate implementation options, create tests, review design details and check security, performance and accessibility. In a bygone era, this could take the equivalent of entire years' worth of work. The Builder becomes the orchestrator. A 2026 MIT Sloan write-up of research on 187,000 GitHub developers found Copilot access increased coding activity by 12.4% and decreased project management activity by 24.9%. Junior developers achieved the largest gains.

Rather than the Builder making expertise obsolete, the role democratizes expertise and makes this quality more horizontal.

We will absolutely continue to need great designers, engineers, product leaders, QA specialists, security experts and domain experts. But their roles are evolving. Instead of owning every task, they create standards, define frameworks, analyze critical decisions and orchestrate the agents that help Builders move faster. In the past, experts guided humans directly. Today and in the future, experts will also guide the systems and AI capabilities that guide humans. That oversight earns trust. In Tipalti's December 2025 State of AI in Finance report, finance professionals said the ability to review AI actions (55%) and custom-configure workflows (55%) are the capabilities that matter most. Builders move fastest when experts have made the systems around them understandable and accountable.

Hiring is already trending toward this approach. Leading organizations are hiring fewer general technologists overall while becoming far more selective, with rising demand for senior engineers, architects, product managers and designers who can set standards and orchestrate work using AI tools across teams, vendors and agents. Gartner projects that by 2029, at least half of knowledge workers will develop the skills to work with, govern or create AI agents on demand.

The Builder model changes the physics of a technology organization. One Builder, supported by agents and guided by strong horizontal experts, may carry a feature from idea to production with far less coordination than before. Fewer handoffs, fewer dependencies, less wasted time. The organization becomes smaller, flatter and faster, especially as expertise becomes more accessible to whoever is closest to the problem.

For me, that is the most exciting part. AI may bring back something many of us lost as our companies scaled: the feeling of actually building. Taking an idea, understanding the problem, shaping the solution, creating it, testing it and seeing it reach and empower the end user.

The signs of this future are here. We can see individuals building in a manner that once required extensive teams. People have freedom to move across disciplines faster than before. We can see AI reducing distance between idea and execution. It is still early, and it is still messy but the benefits of faster execution can be society-wide.

Instead of being the proverbial polymath, The Builder can learn enough to move the work forward and orchestrate the tools needed to execute. That is where our profession is heading.

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