Agentic AI to Reshape Engineering Workflows From Assistance to Autonomy in 2026

Summary

CIO published an analysis by Encora CTO Lalit Wadhwa outlining how agentic AI systems are progressively restructuring software engineering workflows through three evolutionary phases: assistance (discrete tasks like code completion), augmentation (multi-step workflows like automated test generation and PR review), and autonomy (cross-domain operations that span planning, implementation, testing, and deployment without direct human orchestration for each step). The piece argues that organizations