AI is Revolutionizing Software Development: OpenAI’s Andy Brown Says Companies Must Adapt to Faster, Smarter Engineering Cycles

OpenAI’s Asia-Pacific go-to-market lead Andy Brown says artificial intelligence is not only changing the products companies create but also revolutionizing how they build them. Speaking at Tech Week Singapore 2025, Brown highlighted a growing shift among enterprise customers toward faster, more agile software development cycles. Traditionally, companies structured their projects around long sprint cycles, focusing on incremental progress over weeks or months. But Brown observed a move toward a more continuous, product-release-driven model—where updates are delivered rapidly and frequently. This shift, he said, is being driven by the speed and capabilities of modern AI. He pointed to OpenAI’s own development pace as a benchmark. The company regularly releases major updates within weeks, and in some cases, multiple improvements in a single week. Brown noted that OpenAI’s Agent Builder, a drag-and-drop platform for creating custom AI agents, was developed in just six weeks—with roughly 80% of the code generated by OpenAI’s AI models. “This velocity is only possible because software engineering itself is changing,” Brown said. “AI is forcing companies to rethink how they build technology internally. Are we pushing ourselves to change the fundamental ways we work?” He emphasized that the pace of AI advancement has accelerated dramatically. “For the last two years, I’ve seen incredible compression in AI capabilities,” he said. “The gap between major breakthroughs has shrunk from one to two years to just one to two months.” This rapid evolution is evident across the industry. OpenAI launched GPT-4o in May and quickly followed up with real-time voice features, in-chat image generation, and a marketplace for AI tools. Google announced over two dozen new AI features at its I/O conference in May, with CEO Sundar Pichai stating, “We are shipping faster than ever.” Meanwhile, Anthropic released its latest model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, just four months after Sonnet 4, reflecting the intense competition in the generative AI space. Brown urged businesses to embrace AI tools early and experiment with them. “The window to understand and adapt is now,” he said. “Companies that don’t start testing and integrating AI into their workflows risk falling behind in this new era of software development.”