AI has become an integral part of today’s software solutions – both in the products themselves and in the everyday work of the teams that develop them. Unikie’s recent webinar, titled Real Wins Through AI-Driven Software Development, looked at how modern development teams utilize AI and what the real benefits are.
In the webinar, Unikie’s CMO Elina Mansner talked with an interesting mix of Unikie experts, including Unikie’s AI Catalyst Pekka Martikainen. In addition, Tero Haataja, Program Manager for Unikie’s drone solutions and Tommi Kinnunen, Head of R&D for Unikie Marshalling, shared insights and results from Unikie’s R&D teams.
Four Wins Where AI Pays Off for Companies
The AI demo era is over. AI has become a full-time working method that touches every feature, every bug fix and every refactoring task.
That was the main message by Pekka Martikainen, Unikie’s AI Catalyst, whose main job is to coach Unikie’s development teams in the efficient use of AI. Pekka also practices what he preaches: he hasn’t written a single line of code manually in the last 12 months.
Pekka sees AI as a power tool – or a stick of dynamite – that teams and individuals must learn to use properly. With AI, developers’ work has shifted from execution to thinking and decision-making. The new core skill for developers is clarity: being able to give AI explicit instructions, making the design choices AI can’t make and reviewing the output.
With AI, organisations have to change, too. When developers get faster at implementation, the bottlenecks migrate to product owners and testers who need to keep up with the development speed. Product owners need to make continuous product decisions, testing must change from gatekeeping to a pipeline and senior engineers become conductors who set constraints, guard architecture and review AI output.
In the end, the wins come in four ways.
Velocity – higher speed in the whole implementation cycle – is the obvious benefit. However, another benefit is actually quality: persistent bugs get cracked faster, edge cases get caught in review and so on. When the team knows what they are doing, there’s no need for tradeoffs.
The other wins come in better processes where AI agents can come into play and in overall capabilities as AI-enabled engineers become powerhouses that let teams do things that were not feasible before.
AI Evolution Path In R&D Teams
Next, Unikie’s R&D leaders Tero Haataja and Tommi Kinnunen compared the experiences related to adopting AI between two Unikie development teams.
Both leaders felt that Unikie’s AI coaching was well-received by the teams. In many products, AI is an important part of the solution, so adopting AI-driven development practices in the teams’ daily work felt natural.
The shift is gradual: from first ChatGPT or Copilot experiments the teams move from using GitHub Copilot or Claude all the way to taking AI agents into use. Individual AI advocates or enthusiasts help the entire team move forward and eventually the team reaches a critical mass of people using AI.
As many Unikie teams work with safety-critical solutions, the teams employ strict processes for ensuring that AI-assisted code does not go to the product before being reviewed by humans. A human expert is needed to see that product requirements are met and that the final tests are done properly. In an agentic development workflow, the human expert has to be “the adult in the room”, guiding the AI agents to the right direction.
AI-driven development has allowed Unikie’s teams to do more with strict budgets and limited human resources. However, for the Unikie team leaders, the biggest win has not been time savings or better quality. The biggest win is that everyone in the team has adopted AI in their daily work – AI empowers developers and reinforces their can-do attitude.
Introducing UnikieMind – Agentic Platform for AI-driven Development
As the conclusion for the webinar, Unikie launched UnikieMind, an agentic AI platform for AI-driven software development.
UnikieMind allows Unikie’s customers to bring AI-native software development into their development lifecycles, and with the help of Unikie engineers, upgrading the productivity of the entire software engineering team to a new level.
Learn more
To learn how you can stay on top of the AI transformation, read more about UnikieMind.
See the recording of the webinar Real Wins Through AI-Driven Software Development, broadcast on May 5, 2026.
