How AI Is Transforming Software Engineering & DevOps

Danny Valentino, Director of Digital and Store Technologies at Home Hardware, joins Telmo Silva for a frank conversation about AI adoption inside one of Canada’s largest retail cooperatives. Spanning over 1,000 stores and a hybrid tech stack that includes 30-year-old DOS-based point-of-sale systems and modern Flutter front ends, Home Hardware is navigating the same tensions every organization faces: how to harness AI without losing the engineering rigour that holds everything together.

Questions We Asked

• How is AI changing the role of developers and what happens to engineering culture when the senior ones retire?
• Where is grassroots AI adoption actually happening across a large decentralized retailer, and how do you govern it without stifling it?
• Is prompt engineering a real skill to hire for, or just a passing trend?

What We Learned

• DevOps beats prompt engineering. The most in-demand profile right now isn’t a prompt engineer, it’s a DevOps professional who understands how systems connect end to end.
• Senior developers are becoming architects. The shift isn’t about managing people, it’s about transmitting architectural thinking before it walks out the door.
• Grassroots AI is already everywhere. From content creation to contract analysis, teams are using AI tools with or without a formal policy in place.
• AI will quietly become invisible. The boldest prediction: AI stops being a topic and simply becomes part of how work gets done, embedded, seamless, unremarkable.

From Legacy Code to Copilot: AI Lands on the Dev Floor

Home Hardware’s digital team sits at 100% AI adoption. Every developer touches Copilot for GitHub in some form, whether to decode 30-year-old Progress/OpenEdge point-of-sale code or to optimise JavaScript on the e-commerce front end. The store technology team tells a different story: Danny estimates around 10 to 15% adoption, largely because older proprietary platforms offer less surface area for AI assistance. That gap is narrowing, though. As Flutter developers join the team to modernise the POS layer, AI becomes a practical necessity rather than a choice.

The Purists, the Juniors, and the Knowledge Transfer Problem

Not everyone welcomes the shift. Danny calls them the purists, senior engineers who are efficient, precise, and deeply sceptical of AI-generated code they didn’t author themselves. Telmo frames the real risk: when those developers retire, will the next generation be able to solve problems without AI? Home Hardware’s answer is a structured pseudo-review process. Before a junior developer writes a line of code, they walk through the approach with a senior team member, not to slow things down, but to pass on architectural thinking that no model can replicate.

It’s not about job security. It’s about continuing to develop this talent and continuing with the rigour and structure going forward.
Danny Valentino, Director of Digital and Store Technologies, Home Hardware

Empowering senior engineers as architects, rather than people managers, is how Danny keeps them engaged and their knowledge alive inside the organisation.

Governance Without a Policy: The Grassroots Reality

Home Hardware doesn’t yet have a formal AI use policy, and Danny is candid about what that looks like in practice. Copilot is deployed enterprise-wide through Azure, keeping sensitive data within the organisation’s walls. But outside that perimeter, teams are using ChatGPT, personal subscriptions, and tool-embedded AI agents independently, often without visibility from the centre. The merchandising team uses AI for contract analysis. Marketing uses it for content. Some employees pay out of pocket for their own licences. The policy is coming, and when it does, its core message will be simple: use the AI your organisation provides, so your data stays where it belongs.

What Home Hardware Is Actually Hiring For

One year ago, every Microsoft conference was dominated by prompt engineering. Today, Danny hasn’t hired a single one. The real gap is DevOps, professionals who understand how systems connect, how infrastructure behaves at scale, and how to operationalise what developers build. Paired with senior architects who can hold the overall technical vision, that combination is where Home Hardware is investing. The grey-haired purist and the operationally-minded DevOps engineer: that’s the team that carries legacy infrastructure into a modern AI-integrated environment.

One Bold Prediction: AI Becomes Invisible

Danny’s closing prediction isn’t dramatic, and that’s the point. AI will be demystified. It will stop being the centrepiece of every vendor pitch and every internal initiative, and it will simply become embedded in the way work gets done. The agents-talking-to-agents era is already beginning. The organisations that will navigate it best are the ones that stop chasing the next model and start building the governance, the culture, and the connective tissue that makes AI useful at scale, quietly, reliably, every day.