{"slug": "cursor-and-nokia-ai-matters-less-for-speed-than-expanding-developers", "title": "Cursor and Nokia: AI Matters Less for Speed Than Expanding Developers’ Capabilities", "summary": "At the RAISE Summit in Paris, Cursor COO Jordan Topoleski and Nokia CTO Pallavi Mahajan discussed how AI adoption in software teams has evolved through three stages, with the third stage requiring companies to rethink organization when one engineer manages multiple AI agents. Topoleski noted that many organizations plateau at 35 to 45 percent of AI-generated code reaching production, and cited a large insurance company that saw a threefold increase in output after splitting teams of eight or nine engineers into smaller teams of about four. Mahajan emphasized that technology is never the bottleneck; people, culture, and the operating model are.", "body_md": "# Cursor and Nokia: AI Matters Less for Speed Than Expanding Developers’ Capabilities\n\nThis year, **I attended the RAISE Summit in Paris**\n\n[.](https://www.raisesummit.com/)Among the conversations I followed, one panel in particular caught my attention: “The ROI on Intelligence: Turning AI Investment into Enterprise Transformation.”\n\nWhat made it especially interesting to me was that it moved beyond the familiar question of how much AI can speed up an individual developer.\n\nInstead, it raised a more compelling one: how do you organize software development when **one engineer is no longer working with a single AI tool**, but coordinating five, six, or seven agents at once?\n\n## AI adoption in software teams has evolved through three stages\n\nThe conversation featured **Jordan Topoleski**, COO at Cursor, and **Pallavi Mahajan**, CTO at Nokia, and was moderated by Bloomberg’s Peter Elstrom. Topoleski’s view of how AI adoption in software teams has evolved through three stages** **is particularly revealing, as it clearly illustrates just how quickly the nature of developers’ work has changed.\n\nThe first stage was defined by tools such as autocomplete, designed to** speed up existing tasks**.\n\nThe second began with the **emergence of AI agents**, which developers can already delegate entire tasks to.\n\nThe third, which is only just beginning, brings a much deeper shift: companies no longer need to introduce more capable tools, but to rethink how development, teams, and responsibilities are organized when a **single engineer is managing multiple agents** working in parallel.\n\nWe need to redesign the system for a world where one person can work with five, six, or seven different agents at the same time.\n\nTopoleski believes this shift also requires a different way of thinking about productivity. Figures such as AI spend per developer or token usage say very little on their own about the value a company actually receives.\n\nThat is why companies are **increasingly shifting their attention from inputs to concrete outcomes,** asking what the team actually managed to deliver because of that investment.\n\nCursor already sees the limits of simply adding AI tools to the existing development process at large companies without making deeper changes to how that process works.\n\nTopoleski says many organizations plateau at around** 35 to 45 percent of AI-generated code eventually reaching production**, which suggests that giving developers more capable tools alone will not take them to the next stage.\n\nTo fully use their potential, companies also need to adapt both their organization and their development process to an AI-native way of working.\n\nOne consequence of this shift is a **different distribution of time across the software development lifecycle**. Technical teams have traditionally spent a large part of their time writing and reviewing code, and AI can now speed up both activities particularly well.\n\nHowever, as teams speed up these tasks, **the bottleneck simply moves to another stage of the process**.\n\nAs a result, planning and design, as well as review, testing, and deployment, become increasingly important parts of the development cycle, because faster code generation means little if the rest of the system cannot keep up.\n\n**The shift also affects team size**. Topoleski pointed to a large insurance company that split its teams of eight or nine engineers into smaller teams of about four, and the smaller teams moved through the organization much faster thanks to the lower coordination burden. The company saw roughly a threefold increase in output, suggesting that AI can change the economics of teamwork itself.\n\nNokia already sees a similar transformation inside its own organization, while Mahajan believes technology itself rarely creates the biggest obstacle to this kind of change:\n\nTechnology is never the bottleneck. People, culture, and the operating model are the bottleneck.\n\nThat is why the changes do not stop with the tools developers use. They also affect the traditionally clear boundaries between roles in the development process.\n\nNokia previously had separate positions such as software engineer, test engineer, release qualification engineer, and product manager, but Mahajan says those boundaries are now gradually fading and merging into a broader role she calls the “product builder.”\n\nIn other words, **AI is changing code writing as well as how teams distribute responsibility**.\n\n## How much AI should developers be allowed to use?\n\nAs developers use more advanced models, companies need to find a balance between **controlling budgets and giving developers the freedom to use AI when it creates value**.\n\nAt one point, Nokia experimented with quotas for engineers, but Mahajan said the approach caused negative reactions. The company then moved to a more flexible model:\n\nInstead of strict restrictions, Nokia now uses “soft limits.” When developers exceed a certain quota, they receive a notification, but they can continue using the resources if they decide they need them.\n\nCursor also supports a more dynamic approach. The most advanced models** do not need to be the default choice for every task**. Some jobs benefit from frontier models, while teams can handle others with much cheaper models without significantly reducing quality.\n\nIn one project with a large hardware company, Topoleski says Cursor helped reduce costs by 26 percent while the organization continued to increase the share of code that made it into production.\n\n**The real ROI may not come from developers doing less**\n\nHowever, one of the most interesting points from the panel was that AI’s biggest value may not come from cutting costs.\n\nTopoleski argues that many companies have never lacked ideas. The challenge has been turning those ideas into reality. When AI takes over some of the execution, **developers can spend more time thinking about what they actually want to build:**\n\nThis also changes how companies look at their roadmaps, as projects that were previously pushed aside because of limited time and resources can now become possible.\n\nInstead of simply helping companies complete their existing roadmap faster, **AI can expand what they are able to build** in the first place.\n\nWith AI agents and systems that run multiple agents in parallel, the impact goes far beyond writing code faster. Developers are changing the size of development teams, the boundaries between roles, and the entire process of turning an idea into production.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-and-nokia-ai-matters-less-for-speed-than-expanding-developers", "canonical_source": "https://shiftmag.dev/cursor-nokia-raise-summit-2026-11422/", "published_at": "2026-08-17 13:09:37+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-17 13:40:57.772620+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-agents", "ai-products", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Cursor", "Nokia", "Jordan Topoleski", "Pallavi Mahajan", "RAISE Summit", "Peter Elstrom", "Bloomberg"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-and-nokia-ai-matters-less-for-speed-than-expanding-developers", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-and-nokia-ai-matters-less-for-speed-than-expanding-developers.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-and-nokia-ai-matters-less-for-speed-than-expanding-developers.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/cursor-and-nokia-ai-matters-less-for-speed-than-expanding-developers.jsonld"}}