Presentation: The Five Stages of AI Maturity in Engineering Organizations - Where and Why Teams Get Stuck

Lizzie Matusov: My name is Lizzie Matusov. I am the co-founder and CEO of Quotient. We spend a lot of our time studying bottlenecks in software engineering, especially as those bottlenecks change with AI. I think one truth that all of us have felt is that innovation is moving very fast. If you're feeling like this movement is almost unprecedented in its nature, know that you're not alone in that feeling, because AI spend is moving faster than really anybody forecasted. Just in 2026, we've seen a 47% year-over-year growth in global AI spending. We are now projected to spend $2.5 trillion on AI, and 72% of enterprises are running at least one AI workload in production. That pace is exceptional. I think it goes to show that at this point, AI is a necessary part of how we build software. The thing is, when AI spend is moving faster than anyone has forecasted, that also means that we're blowing past all of our enterprise's expectations of that spend. Let's take Uber, for example. They recently announced that they had burned through their entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. That's one-third of the amount of time. Of course,…