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Where engineering teams build 10x faster
AI Squads · Tier 5 · The Forward Edge

Multiple agents in tandem. Today, mostly in code.

Squads, multi-agent coordination, are running in production right now, inside engineering teams at Adobe, Block, GitHub, Atlassian. Business operations are next, but only after the data foundation underneath catches up. This page is where that line sits today.

CTRLPLANCODETESTSHIP
Block A
Squad architecture
  • ·A controller agent plans the work, splits it, and reconciles results.
  • ·Specialist agents own narrow surfaces: code, tests, review, deploy.
  • ·Humans steer at the edges, not at every keystroke.
PRTKTIDEDPL
Block B
Software engineering, mostly
  • ·Pull requests, ticket triage, and IDE pair-flows are the live ground.
  • ·Adobe, Block, GitHub, Atlassian are publishing the playbooks.
  • ·Code is structured, version-controlled, and tested. Squads thrive there.
SQUADSGOVERNANCEINTEGRATIONDATA QUALITY← GATE
Block C
Data is the gate
  • ·Squads in business ops need clean, integrated, governed data underneath.
  • ·Most enterprises are still mid-integration. The foundation isn't ready.
  • ·The next two years close that gap. Squads follow.
From the field
TIME UNDER TENSION
May 6, 2026

How Adobe are teaching their 10,000 person software team to build 10x faster

Three patterns emerge: Agent Delegation, Agentic Orchestration, and AI Pods. Combined, they let Adobe ship 10x faster.
Tim O'Neill, interview with Alexandru Costin (Adobe VP, AI & Innovation)
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HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
April 22, 2026

The org chart is starting to look like a multi-agent diagram

Engineering leaders are flattening teams around orchestrated AI pods. The middle layer of the org is the layer being rewritten first.
Lena Park, contributing editor
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MIT SLOAN MGMT REVIEW
March 2026 issue

Why the squad pattern stalls outside engineering, for now

In every interview the same answer surfaced: our data isn't clean enough, our systems don't talk, our governance hasn't caught up. Squads are downstream of those fixes.
R. Aiyer and J. Holloway
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IEEE SPECTRUM
February 2026

Inside the agentic dev loop: when controllers hand off to specialists

The interesting work isn't a single smart model. It is the choreography between a planner, a coder, a reviewer, and a deployer that never sleeps.
Field report, S. Mehta
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Most enterprise data foundations aren't ready for squads yet. That's the work of the next two years. Today, squads earn their keep in code.