AGENTIC ENGINEERING CASE STUDY

How an ITA Group Engineering Team Became Agentic-First in Six Weeks

ABOUT ITA

  • ITA Group helps leading brands around the world take action with confidence, driving increased sales, purchases, retention, referrals and alignment.
  • Through events, incentives, recognition, loyalty, research and learning, ITA Group transforms how business feels for employees, channel partners and customers.

AT A GLANCE

  • In six weeks, an ITA Group engineering team that had never used coding agents became agentic-first.
  • Working alongside two embedded Lean TECHniques engineers on Claude Code, the team doubled throughput, improved quality and shipped 99%+ AI-generated code. It also became the lighthouse team the rest of the organization now looks to.
100% INCREASE IN THROUGHPUT
99% AI-GENERATED CODE

THE PROBLEM

Coding agents are changing how software gets built, but most teams haven't changed how they work. A Midwest engagement and loyalty leader set out to see what agentic delivery could do on real work.

In Stack Overflow's 2025 Developer Survey, 84% of developers said they use or plan to use AI tools in their development process, up from 76% the year before. Yet 46% said they don't trust the accuracy of those tools' output, up from 31%. Adoption is climbing faster than confidence.

THE OPPORTUNITY

THE OPPORTUNITY

ITA Group had a consequential business application that needed to ship quickly, and leadership wanted to see what agentic delivery could do on real work. They chose an engineering team that was skeptical of AI, and a live use case, as the proving ground.

THE SOLUTION

APPROACH

Lean TECHniques embedded two senior engineers alongside ITA Group's team for six weeks. Together they built out the time-sensitive application and put agentic engineering practices in place across the SDLC on Claude Code, coaching agentic-first methods along the way. This approach blended capacity uplift while building the capability internally to keep going. Before the engagement was over, other teams were already asking for the same support, and the client team's view of AI had shifted to optimism. ITA Group's engineers took it from there, authoring their own skills and extending the practices themselves.

THE IMPACT

THE RESULTS

• 99%+ of shipped code AI-generated. About 100,000 lines were delivered across the engagement, all reviewed by AI and a human before merge.

• 2x throughput with the same team and no quality concessions.

• 10x improvement in quality, measured by DORA change failure rate.

• No automated test suite to ~98% coverage, with 5,000+ tests.

• Most stories completed in under 15 minutes. The largest refactors ran under 90 minutes of autonomous agent time.

• Requirements throughput kept pace. The BA went from readying 15–20 stories per two-week sprint to 50–60 per week.

• Fewer defects reaching QA. QA typically found 2–3 issues per story. On this agentic-first team, they rarely found any.

• Deep adoption. Engineers began authoring their own custom skills and running up to five concurrent agent sessions.

• Usage outgrew the original plan. Mid-engagement, developers running concurrent agent sessions began hitting daily ceilings, so the team upgraded to unlimited Claude Code.

100%INCREASE IN THROUGHPUT
99%AI-GENERATED CODE

THE PROBLEM

HOW THIS COMPARES TO INDUSTRY BENCHMARKS

Most organizations have coding assistants in the hands of their developers. What the majority are still working toward, though, is real, measurable gains in throughput and quality – without losing control of what ships.

A 2026 report from DX ("AI and Engineering Velocity longitudinal analysis") found the median company saw only a 7.76% gain in throughput and the 90th-percentile band sat at 44%+.

The ITA Group team had 100%+ gains.