How do you use AI in your work?

Alex PadulaFounder & Architect @TidesDB

You started programming at 12 or 13. How does AI change things for you?

I think it impacts everybody. Even though I love programming, it's very easy to just go and use AI. I find myself doing that more and more, and I don't fully like it. It's becoming artisan to write nice code and think about each line you write, but it's also way slower. I compare it to cutting grass: you can use the push mower with no gas, or scissors, or you can get the machine you sit on and ride.

Cornelia BiacsicsPrincipal Program Manager @Microsoft

How do you use AI tools in your day-to-day work?

I work a lot with Microsoft Copilot. I think AI is particularly useful when you're working with large amounts of information. It really helps with analysis, identifying patterns, and summarizing information. For me, it helps to find a starting point for broader research and for exploring ideas. It's not a replacement for your own thinking, but it can definitely help you ask different questions, challenge ideas, or look at challenges from other perspectives. I think it doesn't replace knowledge, because you still need to understand the context. I see it more as support for making your own decisions based on information and inputs.

Elisa UsaiSenior Delivery Manager @dbi services

How have you used AI?

To be transparent, I don't yet use AI enormously in my work. I'm still a little bit in a phase of exploration. Now I'm starting a little bit to use it if I need to summarize faster, to synthesize information. But not much more than that. Afterwards, if I think about our role, whether it's DBA or delivery manager, I can see a potential in relation to certain things: log analysis, the automation of certain tasks, etc.

Flora BarrieleOracle Database@AWS EMEA Black Belt

Speaking of automation, that brings us to AI. What do you think about everything that's happening?

I use AI a lot on a daily basis. I don't claim to be an AI expert or to do AI-oriented development. The first thing that comes to mind is the productivity angle, if that's the right term. I'm a fairly organized person, I like having my little notes, my little notebooks, organizing my things.

Yves ColinCustomer Engineer Data Management @Google

What's your AI workflow?

I use it very often day to day, with two main use cases. The first is to organize my work: summarizing emails, tracking the tasks I still have to do, that kind of thing. That's the fairly classic use. I also use AI a lot to build useful demos that really fit the customer's context. It definitely speeds things up, because before, preparing a relevant demo could take a huge amount of time. The third use case is more for testing edge case features, setting up test plans or designing tests that match use cases a customer wants to implement.

Damien ClochardCo-founder & Product Owner @Dalibo

What's your AI workflow?

I'm kind of old school, I don't use LLMs much. Out of curiosity I explore a bit, but I don't really code with them, partly because what I do is very specific: Rust code running inside C that rewrites SQL on the fly. It's a domain with so many layers that the answers are... not necessarily irrelevant, but it takes me almost as much time to rewrite everything anyway. Maybe I just don't know how to use them well. For now it's mostly curiosity.

Ege GüneşTeam Lead, Kubernetes Operators @Percona

How do you use AI yourself?

I was actually quite skeptical of AI at first, and to some extent I still am. But around the end of last year, the quality improved significantly. Before that, it often produced poor code. Today, that's much less true. Like most companies in the industry, Percona is encouraging people to use AI tools, so I decided to give them a serious try. Initially, I mostly used AI to generate tests. Over the last couple of months, I've also started using it for coding tasks, and the results have been surprisingly good.

Matt CornillonData Cloud & AI Specialist @Google

How do you use AI day to day?

Today, AI is absolutely everywhere in my daily life at Google, especially around Gemini. We have access to public products, such as the Gemini app or Workspace integrations, but also to many internal tools, sometimes still prototypes, developed for our own use cases. Concretely, my day often starts with automatically generated briefs in Gmail, summarizing the important topics I need to handle based on my recent activity. We also use tools that can analyze our current tasks and help us organize or prepare certain actions.

Cedric VillemainPresident / CEO @Data bene

Do you use AI in your day-to-day work?

Like many people I suppose, I started with ChatGPT. We had a company account, that was great. But for the past six months, the work I do runs on AI systems we administer directly on GPUs, not our own models, but open source models we use. There's the classic chat side, which lets you do quick discovery, faster than Google. But there's also all the agentic development across different agentic strategies. At the developer level within the team, everything around code generation is clearly a massive time-saver, including doc generation.

Mikaël FrancoeurSoftware Engineer @Turso

How do you use AI?

There’s something Kris Jenkins once posted on LinkedIn that really stuck with me. He said that when something becomes twice as easy to do, it often becomes ten times more useful. I think that idea applies very well to AI. Where AI really shines is in automating tedious and time-consuming tasks. Once those tasks become easier, you naturally start doing them more often because the cognitive barrier becomes much lower. For example, I built a skill, which I shared on Discord and will probably publish soon on GitHub, that asks an AI to automatically create a GitHub issue. It goes through the documentation, builds a minimal reproducer, and even suggests where the bug might come from.

Bertrand DrouvotSenior Database Engineer @AWS

What do you think about the impact of AI?

There are positives and negatives. On the positive side, AI can significantly improve productivity for small functions, test scripts, or even reading assembly code. I personally use it for small C experiments and testing ideas quickly. For performance investigations, it can also help interpret assembly better than I can in some cases. The negative side is that we now see patches generated without real understanding behind them. In open source, that can become a problem. “The important thing is not whether you use AI or not. The important thing is being able to understand what you submit or review.”