Mastering AI in Software Development: How WillowTree's Breakthrough is Redefining Speed, Cost, and Quality Today

At WillowTree offices across North America, we're witnessing a transformation where enterprise-grade digital products are being built at breakthrough speeds and costs — and it's happening in an unexpected way.

Picture this: Seasoned experts — a developer, a designer, and a strategist — gather around a single monitor, their collective expertise amplified by AI tooling. They move as one unit, finishing each other's thoughts and making real-time decisions across technical architecture, user experience, and business strategy. Their client is right there with them, either physically or virtually, contributing and providing feedback in near real-time as their vision takes shape with unprecedented precision.

That’s just one example of how our AI-First Lean Teams use AI to amplify collaboration and rewrite the rules of software development. To understand why our most experienced teams are calling this their preferred way of working, and why clients are seeing uncompromised results, we sat down with the architects of this breakthrough approach:

Derek Brameyer: Head of Application Engineering

Margo Bulka: VP, Strategy Consulting

Alex Carr: Managing Director, Design

How did the initial vision for AI-First Lean Teams come to be?

Margo: We've been building award-winning mobile solutions since the App Store started back in 2008. We’ve thrived by obsessively asking, “What’s next? And how can we outdo ourselves this time?" And then answering those questions with a solution that’s rooted in our deep understanding of what clients need, what’s possible, and how we can achieve it like no one else can. When AI tools exploded onto the scene, we took a hard look at our own process — and found more untapped potential than we knew what to do with. That's what led us to AI-First Lean Teams.

Alex: AI is transforming our industry, giving us the ability to rapidly iterate and push the boundaries of what any team or individual is capable of. We felt that AI and machine learning had to be a foundational element in any sort of new working model.

Derek: There’s a familiar Steve Jobs quote we’ve been citing for the last 15 years: “A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.” Our experience in tech told us that a lean team reduces the nodes of communication that you have. So, it's not just that we’re using AI to help solve problems and for automation, it’s that the level of creative collaboration is being heightened from small team enablement. AI helps you cover the responsibilities of larger teams in ways that weren’t previously possible. So, fewer people can do the work of many if they're leveraging the right tool set.

At their leanest, AI-First Lean Teams are comprised of three senior experts. What drove that decision?

Margo: Having three members proved to be the most effective number to start because they create a Venn Diagram of user desirability, business viability, and tech feasibility. Each trio forms a brain trust of strategy, design, and development, working shoulder to shoulder, not silo to silo. What we believe is the future is this notion of an AI generalist. We have deep expertise on each team that covers the full spectrum of the software development lifecycle. But now with AI, we're seeing team members expand their responsibilities and contributions beyond where they traditionally could.

Derek: That’s right, our AI-First Lean Teams are reflexively reaching for AI to consult on any given problem. Any time that you don't know a domain or how a role or responsibility is supposed to work, you can level up really quickly by interacting with the right AI tools. In our case, those are primarily Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Fuel iX. Across the board, this accelerates our ability to rapidly prototype or ideate a solution.

What are some examples of how AI assists software development beyond idea generation?

Alex: In our AI-First Lean Teams, designers are actually coding with AI — so they have less use for traditional design tools now. AI acts as a translator and allows them to build a new flow, add new and complete features, or change parts of the design. A strategist might sit down and do the same thing. They might go research and talk to customers, develop insights, and realize, “We need this change … We need these features … This is going to help change the behaviors of our customers, etc.” And they can be empowered to go and implement it because they can use AI to make those changes alongside their partners on the team.

It’s created this idea of “build to think.” We don't need to go and work out all of our ideas as plans or representations. We can actually build it and iterate on those ideas live. And because AI has made code generation cheaper, if something doesn't work, we can throw it away and quickly start again. As a result, we cut down whole cycles of feedback between engineers and designers, and big chunks of the process end up going away.

Margo: What we’re seeing is radical collaboration in action — teams moving faster not just because of AI-powered tools and automation, but because traditional swim lanes are vanishing. At the end of the day, we're producing a better product, and team members are more excited about the process along the way.

What are the teams that are working this way saying?

Margo: They’re telling me going back to the old ways feels like trading in a jetpack for a tricycle. It just doesn’t make sense for them now because AI has created a super-charged fluency between roles, allowing them to unlock and move faster than they ever thought was possible.

Alex: Creating software is about feedback cycles. Traditionally, you have folks from different disciplines working together to build something, and someone has an idea or a change that needs to happen. Someone else takes that idea and works through it, builds it out, comes back, and reviews it with that person. If we can bring everybody closer to the product, then we can reduce that time or eliminate it entirely.

Derek: Totally, and that’s generating a kind of exhilarating momentum. The energy that we're getting from teams right now is that they firmly believe this is the way software should be built, going forward.

How does this reimagined process benefit WillowTree clients?

Margo: It’s simple. Everyone is a builder, and that includes the client, who is more closely embedded with the team than ever before.

Derek: Yeah, so this is the ideal delivery model for clients where stakeholders want a high degree of involvement. They can collaborate in real time with our teams, which injects even more precision into the process in terms of the quality of the end product and speed-to-value.

Alex: Clients who want to get updates very often as we're making software every day, who want to push their business, push their industry … those are the folks who really benefit from working with AI-First teams. If you’re the type of organization that needs longer review cycles and many stakeholders involved, we have alternate delivery models we’d recommend.

What makes AI-First Lean Teams uniquely WillowTree?

Derek: We’ve worked on the leading edge for nearly twenty years. We use these technologies all the time in our current software development process. AI-First is about marrying our deep experience with the latest AI capabilities and codifying that into the next way to do development … the future of development.

Margo: We use say, "AI-First" — but let’s be clear: this isn’t vibe coding or AI cosplay. This is not just about integrating AI as a tool. This is rebuilding the whole process from the ground up.

‍Alex: And we’re rebuilding the process so we’re the most effective digital partner in the industry. Today, our AI-First Lean Teams are delivering enterprise-grade products at an accelerated rate and at a breakthrough cost. But more importantly, they're building a compounding advantage. Every week they spend collaborating with AI tools and machine learning, they're developing new capabilities that are increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate. That translates to a competitive advantage for our clients, who can test more ideas, improve workflows, deploy more solutions, and respond to market changes in a matter of days. There’s just no better way to be the first to answer, “What’s next, and how can it be done better than anyone else?"