What We Learned Deploying AI within Bloomberg’s Engineering Organization – Lei Zhang, Bloomberg
Dec 16, 2025 · 18:21
Lei Zhang, Bloomberg's Head of Technology Infrastructure Engineering, shares lessons from deploying AI across 9,000+ software engineers, emphasizing that real ROI comes from maintenance and incident response rather than greenfield coding. He details how Uplift Agents automate refactoring patches and Incident Response Agents provide unbiased troubleshooting, both leveraging MCP servers. To avoid duplication, Bloomberg built a Paved Path with a model gateway, tool discovery hub, and standardized deployment. Adoption was boosted by integrating AI into onboarding training and across tech communities, while data showed leadership lagging behind individual contributors—prompting targeted leadership workshops. Zhang concludes that AI changes the cost function of engineering, enabling previously expensive tasks to become cheap, forcing a reexamination of what constitutes high-quality software engineering.
