The innovation cycle is compressing dramatically. At Hydrolix, a real-time analytics platform company, we're witnessing this transformation firsthand within our product development team. What once took months now takes days.
Before widespread AI adoption, launching new features required extensive planning: building roadmaps, projecting revenue impact, calculating resource requirements, and coordinating multi-month development cycles. Today, our team leverages AI to design, build, experiment, and deploy solutions to customers in a matter of days—at a fraction of the cost and resource investment.
This acceleration fundamentally changes how we approach product development. AI enables rapid experimentation, faster customer feedback loops, and dramatically shortened time-to-market for proofs of concept. However, this speed doesn't eliminate the need for human expertise—it transforms it. While AI can generate code, humans remain essential for code review, security analysis, quality assurance, and ensuring solutions actually solve customer problems.
In this session, Director of Field Engineering Tom Howe will explore how AI is reshaping the innovation timeline, the competitive advantages this speed creates, and why human judgment and oversight have become more critical than ever—just in fundamentally different ways.
