Insights from our executive roundtable on AI and engineering productivity

Dropbox hosted an executive roundtable on AI and engineering productivity, sharing lessons from their own AI adoption journey and cross-industry leadership perspectives.

• •Dropbox made AI adoption a company-level priority by securing leadership buy-in, reducing contract approval overhead for piloting new tools
• •Engineers using AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor) show outsized PR throughput gains; most Dropbox developers now use at least one AI tool
• •Dropbox built custom AI tooling for their large multi-language monorepo, including a system that detects failed PR builds and proposes fixes
• •Roundtable discussions surfaced three themes: balancing productivity gains against quality trade-offs, the role of technical leadership in setting AI usage norms, and formalizing AI competency in career frameworks
• •For 2026, focus shifts to mapping productivity gains to concrete business outcomes and extending AI rigor beyond engineering teams