Pushing a Team to Go AI-First Without reducing quality or trust

Thursday, September 24 | 5:00–6:00 PM PT | Online

AI-first is quickly becoming the expectation. But for engineering leaders, the hard part is not asking people to use AI tools. It is helping teams change how they work while still protecting the judgment, quality, and ownership that good engineering depends on.

This roundtable is a candid peer discussion on what it actually takes to move from individual AI experimentation to team-wide habits.

We’ll discuss

1. What “AI-first” actually means in practice: How leaders define the expectation beyond tool usage, and what behaviors signal that AI is becoming part of how the team works.
2. Moving from experimentation to team norms: How leaders encourage adoption, reduce resistance, and make AI part of everyday planning, development, review, and decision-making.
3. Protecting quality as output accelerates: What risks emerge when teams can generate more work faster, and how leaders maintain standards around correctness, maintainability, security, and long-term system health.
4. Building trust without over-controlling the process: How teams decide when to rely on AI, when to verify, when to escalate, and how to avoid both blind trust and blanket skepticism.

Hosted by

Valerii (val) Martseniuk, Engineering Manager @ Newsela

Engineering Manager leading two teams building AI-powered products at an edtech platform serving millions of students. I report to the CTO and operate at the intersection of product strategy, technical architecture, and team building.

Join this conversation with engineering leaders working through one of the most important questions in engineering leadership today:

How do we push teams to become AI-first without reducing the quality and trust that strong engineering depends on?