Why most enterprise AI coding pilots underperform (Hint: It's not the model)

Gen AI in software engineering has moved well beyond autocomplete. The emerging frontier is agentic coding: AI systems capable of planning changes, executing them across multiple steps and iterating based on feedback. Yet despite the excitement around “AI agents that code,” most enterprise deployments underperform. The limiting factor is no longer the model. It’s context: The structure, history and intent surrounding the code being changed. In other words, enterprises are now facing a systems design problem: They have not yet engineered the environment these agents operate in.The shift from assistance to agencyThe past year has seen a rapid evolution from assistive coding tools to agentic workflows. Research has begun to formalize what agentic behavior means in practice: The ability to rea