Getting Your Dev Team to Actually Use AI

Alright, so you’ve gone all in on AI for your dev team. You’ve set the policy. Made it clear this is the way forward. Shared the vision, gave them guidance, maybe even showed off a few cool examples. To done, right?

Not exactly. 😖

Fast forward a few weeks, you check in with your devs and tech leads. You ask, how’s AI working out? Feeling that productivity boost yet? And then they just look at you and say, I haven’t used it.

And now you’re sitting there wondering what’s going on. Why aren’t they seeing the potential? Why aren’t they jumping at this chance to be more productive, more creative?

The reality is, using AI in the day-to-day of real development work isn’t always that simple.

Your top engineers, the ones you rely on, they’re particular. They’ve got their tools set up exactly how they want them. They live in their IDE, they’re deep in the zone, and anything that pops up or distracts them? It’s just annoying. Even if it’s supposed to help.

And now you’ve got a challenge. How do you get these high-performers to see AI not as a distraction, but as something that can actually take their work to another level?

The answer is pretty simple. You don’t just talk about AI in general. You give them real, specific use cases that actually make sense to them. Stuff they deal with that’s annoying, that slows them down.

Take testing for example. Everyone writes code, and that code needs to be tested. Sure, you can have AI help write unit tests, and that’s fine. But the real pain? It’s in the test data. Creating good, realistic, synthetic data to drive those tests takes time, and honestly, most devs just do the bare minimum because it’s tedious. That’s where AI can crush it.

Give your AI tool the data structure, the types, the constraints. Ask it to generate a thousand rows of random but valid data, with edge cases, min and max values. To Done. And now your team is paying attention. Because they care about their code and they care about how it performs, but they also care about not wasting time on things that don’t move the needle. This is the kind of win that clicks.

Another angle—don’t force AI to hover over them while they code. That’s not where the real value is. Instead, get them thinking about how AI can help with those isolated but annoying problems. You know the ones. Complex logic that they can write, sure, but it’s a pain. Instead of starting from scratch, they draft a prompt. I need a function that takes this, does that, handles these edge cases, and spits out a result like this. AI gives them a solid start. Not perfect, but way faster than piecing it together from nothing.

This whole thing isn’t just about talking up AI or pushing it hard on your team. It’s about meeting them where they are and helping them see how AI can fit into their world. Once they feel that first real win, once they see how it actually saves them time and hassle, that’s when they start to get it. And from there, it takes off.

Bottom line, talking about AI is easy. Getting your team to use it takes more than that. Find the spots where they struggle, show them how AI helps, and let them take it from there. No more selling. Just results.