Engineering Enablement by Abi Noda Driving enterprise-wide AI tool adoption
Sep 5, 2025
Bruno Passos, Product Lead for Developer Experience at Booking.com, discusses the company’s ambitious AI integration within its 3,000-person engineering team. He reveals how cultural change was as crucial as technology in driving adoption. Bruno shares innovative approaches such as hackathons, tailored education, and Slack communities that turned skeptics into daily users. He reflects on the initial barriers and highlights the importance of strong leadership and community engagement in boosting AI tool adoption, ultimately positioning Booking.com in the top tier of companies for AI efficacy.
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AI To Remove Toil And Boost Innovation
- Booking.com set AI goals to remove developer toil and accelerate innovation across engineering.
- They framed GenAI as a tool to free developers to spend 80–90% of time on innovation, not replace them.
Early Cody Pilot With Sourcegraph
- Booking.com began GenAI work about 1.5 years ago using Sourcegraph and Cody to navigate legacy code.
- Cody paired with Sourcegraph's context of the codebase and became a practical on-ramp for experiments.
Low Adoption Stemmed From Fear And Illiteracy
- Initial Cody adoption was very low due to fear and lack of LLM literacy among developers.
- Developers worried about job loss and didn't know how to prompt or give context to LLMs effectively.