Dr. Jan-Philipp Steghöfer from XITASO will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “The Upstream Shift: How AI Changes Organisations That Build Software” and it will take place in room 1055N at 4PM on 12 November 2026.

Abstract

Generative AI is changing how software gets built. But the biggest shift is not that AI can write code. It is that, as code generation becomes routine, the real value in software development is moving somewhere else entirely.

In this talk, I argue that value is migrating upstream, to requirements engineering: the fundamentally human work of aligning stakeholders, resolving ambiguity, and turning intention into something a system can act on. Drawing on research into agile requirements engineering and an empirical study of AI-assisted development in industrial practice, I show why requirements have always been the bottleneck in software projects, and why AI is now making that bottleneck impossible to ignore.

This shift matters acutely for software modernization, where legacy systems encode decades of undocumented constraints, and the informal conversations that once kept shared knowledge alive are quietly disappearing. Organisations that have not yet built governance frameworks for this transition are already feeling the consequences.

The talk closes with two open questions: how should development organisations restructure around where value is now created, and how do we develop the next generation of engineers in a world where the traditional path through hands-on development is changing beyond recognition?