Endava Reshaped Itself Into an 'Agentic Organization' With Codex!

Hey everyone, it's Shii-chan! Today I've got an exciting customer story about how AI agents can reshape the very shape of a company.

OpenAI News openai.com

What was announced?

From OpenAI's News, there's a story about how Endava, a global software contracting firm, is putting OpenAI's Codex to work. Endava has engineers across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, shipping software for banks, insurers, retailers, and media companies. As an early adopter of Codex, the company has started calling itself an "agentic organization" — and that's the headline here.

Joe Dunleavy, Endava's regional CTO for Europe, says the way they relate to code has flipped:

"We went from producing a lot of the code ourselves to now overseeing the work that Codex can produce. The quality of output has just gone up exponentially."

Why it matters

An "agentic organization" means senior expertise is codified into agents that work alongside teams across the entire client engagement lifecycle — from intake to ideation to delivery.

Normally, senior judgment takes years of pairing, code review, and mentoring to build. Once you codify it into Codex, a single senior's perspective can guide multiple less-seasoned teams in parallel. That's a big shift in how a company can operate.

What changes

The biggest change is the relationship between senior and junior engineers. Mike Krolnik, Endava's Global SVP of Agentic Architecture, says senior architects can articulate what they want, and Codex makes that accessible to junior people, who can then produce senior, mature-level outputs.

Codex acts as a guide on best practices and architectural decisions, and juniors can ask it questions in the moment. What used to require a senior sitting beside you becomes a learning tool you work with in real time. Encode one senior's perspective into Codex, and it can grow several teams at once, which is the heart of an agentic organization.

Dive Deep

Endava no longer treats analysis, design, and build as separate stages handed off between specialists. Codex packages all three into a single unified tool, so steps that used to take days or weeks compress dramatically.

Here's a concrete example. Endava's legal team brought engineering a hard problem: thousands of pages of contracts to review against specific criteria. Translating the lawyers' needs into something engineering could build would normally take weeks of back-and-forth. Instead, Krolnik's team recorded a two-hour deep-dive meeting with the legal stakeholders, fed the transcript to Codex, and generated a working requirements specification. What could have taken a week or two of revision was compressed into two one-hour meetings.

The same is showing up in client work: teams now produce design docs, diagrams, and specs live in client sessions. Ask Codex to draw a diagram of the proposed software architecture, and it accelerates the back-and-forth, opening a lot of doors.

The article also shares leadership tips.

• Codify your seniors — capturing senior architects' judgment in Codex gives the most leverage.
• Treat Codex as a desktop agent, not a coding assistant — the biggest unlocks came from requirements, design, client communication, and operations.
• Don't just think about it, really try it — Dunleavy suggests starting with a non-coding workflow first.

Wrap-up

• Endava adopted Codex early and now calls itself an "agentic organization."
• Codifying senior judgment into Codex lets juniors produce senior-level outputs.
• Analysis, design, and build fold into one tool, compressing weeks of work into days.
• Non-coding uses, like turning a two-hour meeting transcript into a requirements spec, are where it lands hardest.

This one's for engineering managers, architects, and team leads thinking about how to root AI in real work. It's not a hands-on new feature, but as a hint for reshaping how an org works, I found it genuinely fascinating!