Endava rewired its whole software delivery around AI agents!

Hey there, it's me, Shiichan! Today I've got a fun adoption story: what happens when a company rebuilds itself around AI?

OpenAI News openai.com

What was announced?

OpenAI's News published a story about Endava, a global technology services company. Endava has spent more than 25 years helping enterprises solve complex problems with technology, and lately that mission keeps tilting toward AI.

Endava made OpenAI its company-wide AI platform, giving employees access to ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex. According to CTO Matthew Cloke, the point wasn't adoption for its own sake—it was weaving AI into the everyday flow of work.

"If I don't have an agent running in the background, I somehow think I'm wasting my time."

That's the CTO's own baseline feeling, which tells you how seriously they mean it.

Why it matters

What I love about Endava is that they refused to treat AI as "add a new tool." They rethought workflows, leadership behaviors, and how teams collaborate.

As developers tried AI-assisted coding and agentic workflows, the bottleneck stopped being engineering output. Requirements gathering, business analysis, planning, and stakeholder coordination all had to speed up too.

"We started to challenge how quickly we could produce the right business solutions for our clients," Cloke says. Being AI-native means reaching for AI first to solve a problem, not last.

What changes

The biggest shift is that AI stopped being a developers-only tool.

• Legal teams use AI to streamline research and documentation workflows
• Project managers use Codex to generate governance reports and summarize engineering progress
• Commercial teams swapped spreadsheet-heavy planning for lightweight AI-generated apps

In one internal pricing discussion, people skipped spreadsheets entirely and built a single-page pricing app the team could interact with right away. "It changed the conversation completely," Cloke says.

Leadership leans on agents too—summarizing projects, automating communications, managing inboxes, and coordinating work asynchronously. Work moves forward without someone babysitting every step.

Dive Deep

At Endava's core is DavaFlow, its software delivery lifecycle. Today OpenAI technology runs through the whole thing—from meeting prep and business planning to product discovery, engineering, and deployment. Cloke goes as far as to say there isn't a part of DavaFlow that doesn't use OpenAI technology. You can read more about DavaFlow on Endava's DavaFlow page.

The scale is real: Endava rolled this out across its 11,000-person global workforce. Here are the lessons that emerged.

• Treat AI adoption as behavior change, not a software rollout
• Leaders need to actively use AI to drive company-wide adoption
• Make room for experimentation, even when outcomes aren't perfect
• Bring non-technical teams in early, not later
• Hands-on experience is the fastest way to melt skepticism
• Make AI part of everyday workflows, not a separate initiative

Endava even folded AI fluency into hiring and promotion expectations. The next phase they see is orchestration—combining models, agents, workflows, and human expertise into systems that reshape how the organization operates.

Wrap-up

• Endava made OpenAI its company-wide AI platform and handed out ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex
• OpenAI tech is embedded across every stage of DavaFlow, reaching beyond engineering into legal, finance, and operations
• The rollout spanned 11,000 people, landing AI as a behavior change
• It cut manual reporting and coordination, and let teams build internal tools without dedicated engineers

"The future arrived. You just have to lean into it."

If you're wondering how to spread AI across an organization, this one lands hard. It's for leaders who want to change team and company culture, not only the folks who touch the code.