Winning Over AI's Biggest Holdouts: How Engineering Leaders Can Increase AI Adoption in Senior Software Engineers

The senior developer AI gap

Accelerating developer productivity with AI in software development is more complex than the headlines suggest. While over 75% of developers are now using AI coding assistants and initial studies showed dramatic time savings, the reality on the ground tells a more nuanced story.

Research from Faros AI, analyzing telemetry from over 10,000 developers across 1,255 teams, revealed a paradox: developers using AI are completing more 21% tasks, but companies are not seeing measurable improvement in delivery velocity or business outcomes. 

This disconnect becomes even more nuanced when examining who's actually adopting these tools. While junior and less tenured developers eagerly embrace AI tools, your most seasoned employees—likely the senior developers who architect critical systems and mentor your teams—remain the biggest holdouts.

Senior developers are the backbone of your engineering organization. Their AI resistance has the potential to slow down productivity gains across teams and create cascading organizational costs: cultural signals that AI adoption is optional, reduced multiplicative impact on architectural decisions, and missed innovation potential.

Conversely, senior developers who effectively adopt AI could deliver outsized returns through rapid architectural prototyping, automated comprehensive documentation, and AI-assisted debugging that focuses human expertise on truly complex issues. 

For engineering leaders, this presents both a challenge and an enormous opportunity: Win over your senior developers—and scattered AI wins become compounding, org-level impact. Read this article to learn the barriers to AI adoption in senior software engineers, the strategic importance of overcoming them, and how leaders can transform AI resistance into AI advocacy.

Current AI usage across software engineering

Understanding AI adoption in software engineering requires recognizing the stark differences in how developers at various experience levels and tenures engage with these tools.

Junior developers typically work on well-defined tasks with clear requirements, building standard CRUD operations, implementing known patterns, or fixing straightforward bugs. For these developers, AI tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT serve as powerful accelerators, offering code suggestions for familiar patterns and helping them overcome knowledge gaps. 

Mid-level developers often straddle both worlds. They're comfortable with AI for routine tasks like writing boilerplate code or generating unit tests, but they become more selective when tackling complex architectural decisions. Their usage tends to be tactical rather than strategic.

Senior developers, however, present a different profile entirely. They work on the most complex problems: designing distributed systems, debugging performance bottlenecks, making architectural trade-offs, and navigating decades of accumulated technical debt. For them, AI often feels like a blunt instrument when precision is required.

Beyond seniority levels, tenure also shapes AI adoption patterns. Faros AI found that less tenured engineers (those newer to the company, regardless of seniority) are more likely to lean on AI tools to navigate unfamiliar codebases and accelerate early contributions.

Faros AI’s findings published in July 2025 also reveal that most AI usage remains surface-level across all levels of developers—with most developers using only autocomplete features—while advanced capabilities like chat, context-aware review, or agentic task execution remain largely untapped. 

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When ample experience becomes AI resistance

Senior developers represent AI's biggest untapped potential in engineering organizations. To grasp the challenges of AI adoption in senior software engineers, leaders must examine the realities of their work, their AI usage patterns, and the sources of resistance.

Senior developers operate in a fundamentally different problem space. As seniority increases, engineers spend less time coding. Their efforts are devoted to other high-value tasks: collaborating with stakeholders, handling design APIs for dozens of teams, optimizing queries that handle millions of requests, and making architectural decisions with years-long implications.

More senior developers report using AI selectively for tasks like documentation drafts, test data generation, boilerplate code, and exploring unfamiliar frameworks. However, they tend to avoid AI for core architectural decisions, performance-critical sections, complex debugging, and system integration challenges.

When it comes to understanding why AI is being kept at arm’s length, several interconnected factors may be at play. 

1. Trust and reliability concerns. Senior developers have learned through experience that seemingly minor errors can have catastrophic consequences. When developers have to input numerous prompts to correct an AI tool's erroneous assumption to get an answer to a question, it reinforces the perception that AI tools require more oversight than the value they provide.
2. The complexity gap: AI tools excel at generating code for common patterns but struggle with the unique, context-heavy problems that senior developers face daily. The institutional knowledge about why certain architectural decisions were made, where performance bottlenecks exist, and how different systems interact—this context is often invisible to AI tools.
3. Professional identity and passion: Many senior developers chose engineering because they love solving complex problems. There's a sense that delegating the most interesting work to AI diminishes the intellectual satisfaction that drew them to the profession in the first place.
4. Time and learning curve pressures: A smaller but still significant percentage of engineers fear judgment by their peers for using AI tools. Senior developers are often the busiest people on engineering teams, juggling technical leadership responsibilities with hands-on coding. The time investment required to learn AI tools effectively can feel prohibitive when they already have proven workflows.

How leaders can increase AI adoption in senior software engineers

Mandates won’t change minds, and generic training won’t inspire. For senior developers, embracing AI requires proof, time, and trust—and leaders hold the key to unlocking that shift. Here’s how:

1. Lead with proof from trusted voices.

Skepticism is natural, especially from experienced engineers who’ve seen plenty of hype cycles. That’s why AI adoption needs to start with credible voices. Engineers listen to people they trust and respect. Many senior engineers told us they decided to try AI agents after hearing from a thought leader they trust, one whose usual skepticism made the positive endorsement stand out.

For engineering leaders, the goal is to bring the right voices to their teams. Start by identifying respected technical leads inside your company and empower them to be early champions who openly share their own experiments and lessons with AI.  

Next, curate a focused forum, such as a dedicated Slack or Teams channel, to surface external thought leaders who showcase real stories, working code, and practical experience. Keep the flow intentional and thoughtful, so senior engineers gain trusted perspectives without the hype and avoid feeling overwhelmed.

2. Give them space to experiment.

AI isn’t something you pick up in between code reviews and stand-ups. Senior engineers need the freedom to step back, play with new tools, and figure out where AI actually fits into their workflow. That means time on the calendar, budget for tool exploration, and a clear message that experimentation is encouraged—even if not every attempt succeeds. 

One proven approach is dedicating an entire week to deep AI exploration. During this time, challenge your engineers to do as much of their work as possible with AI. Immersive experiences like this quickly shift perceptions and start to build practical fluency. 

On the budget side, set a fixed monthly allowance for AI tools. One company provided a monthly allowance of $300 per engineer to encourage ongoing experimentation with the latest AI products as they get released.

With this kind of concrete support, senior engineers have an open runway to turn curiosity into confidence and discover smarter ways of working that move the whole team forward.  

3. Amplify the wins.

When engineers do uncover valuable use cases, amplify them. Encourage senior engineers to share their success stories in simple, bite-sized formats, such as short demos, quick team videos, or informal knowledge swaps. Similar to point 1, peer-to-peer learning often carries more weight than formal training. When those success stories are shared and celebrated publicly, it builds momentum and reinforces that AI is worth leaning into. 

Case studies in strategic AI adoption

Case study #1

A major technology company faced a familiar challenge: despite having access to cutting-edge AI coding tools, only 15% of their developers were using them weekly. Their issue wasn't tool quality—it was overcoming developer skepticism. About 30% of their developers worried AI was "a gimmick" that wouldn't live up to its promise, while others tried it once, found it less transformational than expected, and abandoned it entirely.

The breakthrough came through a three-pronged approach that specifically addressed developer concerns. 

• First, leadership provided consistent, visible advocacy that went beyond "you're allowed to use this" to "we want you to use this to do your best work"—making developers 7x more likely to become daily users.
• Second, they implemented formal training that helped developers understand which tasks AI excels at versus where human expertise remains irreplaceable, increasing organization-wide adoption by 20%. 
• Most critically, they empowered local champions—respected senior engineers whose voices carried weight—to share real-world use cases and best practices through team sessions. 

This peer-to-peer approach proved 22% more effective than top-down mandates, as senior developers could demonstrate AI as a "coding assistant" that enhanced rather than replaced their expertise. The result: AI adoption became a competitive advantage rather than a source of resistance.

Case study #2

Vimeo, a Faros AI customer, accomplished something very similar by utilizing lunch-and-learns and knowledge swaps. Watch their story: 

Strategic considerations: Risks and mitigation

As organizations accelerate AI adoption in senior software engineers, several critical considerations should not be overlooked. The goal isn't just to increase AI usage, but to do so in ways that enhance rather than compromise the engineering excellence that senior developers are responsible for maintaining.

Maintaining human oversight and avoiding over-reliance

The sophistication gap between AI capabilities and senior developer requirements creates specific risks that require proactive management. At times, generative AI–based tools provide incorrect coding recommendations and even introduce errors in the code. For senior developers working on mission-critical systems, these errors can have far-reaching consequences.

Establish clear protocols for AI-assisted development that ensure human oversight remains paramount. This includes requiring senior developer review of AI-generated code, implementing automated testing that specifically validates AI outputs, and creating clear escalation paths when AI tools produce unexpected results. Senior developers should be positioned as the final arbiters of technical decisions, with AI serving as a sophisticated but fallible assistant.

Security and intellectual property concerns

Many AI tools require sending code to external services for processing, raising legitimate concerns about intellectual property and security. Senior developers, who often work with the most sensitive and valuable code, need clear guidance on which tools are approved for different types of work.

Develop clear policies around data sharing with AI services, implement on-premises AI solutions where necessary, and ensure senior developers understand the security implications of different AI tools. Their expertise in security and risk assessment makes them natural leaders in establishing these guidelines.

Ethical considerations and professional responsibility

Senior developers often serve as guardians of engineering ethics and professional standards within their organizations. Their AI adoption must align with these responsibilities. This includes ensuring AI tools don't introduce bias into algorithmic systems, maintaining transparency about when AI assistance was used in code development, and preserving the learning opportunities that junior developers need to develop expertise.

Consider establishing ethical AI guidelines specifically for engineering teams, with senior developers playing a leadership role in their development and enforcement. This positions them as AI adoption leaders rather than passive users.

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Unlocking the senior developer multiplier effect

Through 2027, GenAI will spawn new roles in software engineering and operations, requiring 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill. When engineering managers successfully bring senior developers into the AI fold, the returns extend far beyond individual or team-level productivity gains. Senior developers who embrace AI become force multipliers—using their deep expertise to deploy AI tools strategically while mentoring teams on best practices. They reinvest time savings into architectural improvements and code quality initiatives that benefit entire organizations.

Engineering leaders can accelerate AI adoption in senior software engineers by amplifying trusted voices, creating space for hands-on experimentation, and celebrating early wins—treating senior developers as partners in transformation rather than obstacles to overcome. 

To see how best to amplify the returns from your AI investment, schedule a GAINS™ assessment with the Faros AI team today.