Two major UK retailers accelerate AI adoption through Mindera coaching
Mindera embeds AI 'enablement' engineers into the technology teams of two of the UK's biggest retailers to optimise impact and value.
Engineering teams build AI skills while working on delivery priorities, reducing the need for time away from project work.
Keen to ensure their software engineering teams adopt AI successfully while maintaining quality and accountability, two of the UK’s biggest retailers, including a major supermarket chain and iconic food and fashion outlet, have turned to their existing technology partner Mindera for help.
Mindera’s AI coaching programmes combine 'enablement' engineers embedded within working engineering teams with the development of shared AI agents, platform services and governance. Engineers are coached while simultaneously building a platform to help them capture and embed the value of an agentic workflow as they train. They build AI skills while working on delivery priorities, reducing the need for time away from project work.
Encouraging results
Early observations from one of the retailers showed time to pull requests for selected workflows reduced to 25% of the baseline, and approval times fell to 20%, while there was also a 70% drop in feature build duration. As a result, an expanded pilot has now been approved, with a larger enablement team supporting a year of coaching.
AI coaches pair with engineers on production tickets and help squads adopt agentic workflows.
Teams will begin by strengthening specifications, context and acceptance criteria, before applying AI to live work. Coaches then pair with engineers on production tickets and help squads adopt agentic workflows.
Alongside the coaching programme, Mindera’s and the retailer’s platform teams are building a catalogue of approved AI agents and shared services. This gives teams reusable tools with controls for security, model selection and cost, supported by documentation and operational playbooks.
Continuous coaching model
An external engineer from a coached team pairs up with a Mandera coach to train the next team, and so on…
The second retailer is currently running a 14-week pilot programme, with the intention of rolling out the Mindera coaching and transition framework across its internal engineering teams. The extension phase uses a continuous coaching model where an internal engineer from the graduated team pairs up with a Mandera coach to train the next team, systematically generating new in-house coaches. The underlying technical platform built during the pilot phase is designed to be fully reusable, allowing the retailer to onboard future teams easily.
“Mindera was selected in part thanks to providing exact operational details of the proposed 14-week pilot programme, which was subsequently launched,” explained Mindera Account Owner Craig Richards. “The 14-week timeline was chosen to take into account both the need to properly embed behavioural change and the complexity of the current work the team were managing.”
Look out for the latest updates on our coaching programmes and read more about the importance of this work in this blog by our AI Lead Simao Belchior.