How coding agents could blow up software backlogs

Welcome to Runtime! Today: Microsoft's Jay Parikh explains how the company is rebuilding its software-development strategy around AI, Nvidia reassures investors that the AI party still has a bit more life, and the latest enterprise moves.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Jay Parikh played a key role building the infrastructure that allowed Facebook to grow from a fun site to share party photos and catch up with old friends into a global megacorporation that reached 3.5 billion daily users in the last quarter. Now at Microsoft, his mission is to help a different kind of giant rethink the way it builds software.

"Having been in enterprise for a long time and been a developer, just to think about how things were done maybe even, like, five or six years ago, versus what I see [from] the most advanced teams within Microsoft and how they're really putting this capability in today, they're pushing it to the limit," Parikh said in an interview with Runtime this week at Microsoft's Ignite conference. 

Parkih discussed the strategy behind the CoreAI group, how agents are already making possible things that mere copilots could never imagine, and how Microsoft thinks about the overlap between the tools it builds and uses internally to the products it builds for customers. Selected excerpts follow below.

On CoreAI's mandate:

Parikh: I joined Microsoft at the end of October, and then I spent a couple months ramping up and meeting people and learning as much as I could, as fast as I could. In January of this year we formed the CoreAI team, and then in May of this year at Microsoft Build the conference, we put together and explained our overall strategy for the focus of CoreAI, which I can expand upon in a minute.

And then at GitHub Universe [last month], we came back to basically the top part of that product vision that we outlined at Build around reinventing and rethinking everything for AI-powered tools across the entire software development life cycle. Today, here at the Ignite conference, we're entirely focused on how that relates to the enterprise, and specifically the application platform that these modern AI applications — or, more and more these days, agents — are built, deployed and operated on.

On the promise of agentic coding:

Parikh: Singapore Airlines had this project where they wanted to revamp some part of their consumer application. That project originally was scoped for 11 weeks. They were able to use GitHub Copilot and deliver that project in five weeks, so a very big reduction in time to market for them.

What I found more interesting, believe it or not, was the fact that within, like, two months later, that team then basically took their entire backlog of features, bugs, everything they had in the backlog, and that backlog was drained to zero things. That is just incredible; like, who talks about having zero backlog? That is an outcome that I don't think we've ever been able to realize, and now, with AI and being able to have the right training, the right adoption, the right incentives for our teams, that could be something that really does translate into reducing technical debt, having more secure applications, delivering more value, more features, more capabilities, to the customers.

On the golden path:

Parikh: We use lots of different tools, we make lots of different tools. We have this thing, for example, called SRE Agent, and that was a tool that we developed internally to help our engineers manage all of this massive scale operational work. Now we are building that for our own internal productivity and governance and just overall effectiveness, but then we'll turn around and offer that to customers right at some point.

That was done by an engineering team to solve a set of problems for a set of neighboring teams, and more and more Azure teams are using it, and then it's helping to make that product better. And then we'll add a bunch of controls and visibility and other things, then turn that into a product to offer to customers.

Read the full interview on Runtime here.

Editor's note: Microsoft provided Runtime with travel and accommodations to attend Ignite 2025.

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Number still going up

Concern that the white-hot AI market was cooling off dominated the conversation around enterprise tech over the last month or so, but the biggest winner of this boom is still winning. Nvidia reported revenue and earnings that beat Wall Street's expectations on Wednesday, and upped its guidance for the current quarter according to CNBC.

Sales of its data-center GPUs and other chips hit $51.2 billion during the third quarter, which also exceeded expectations and could wind up being more revenue than Intel takes in for all of 2025. The company said GPUs destined for cloud hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft are basically "sold out," and the Blackwell Ultra is now its best-selling GPU.

Nvidia's stock fell a little more than 3% Thursday in line with a generally pessimistic trading day across the board. Still, analysts were undeterred: "This is another validation point for the AI revolution," said Dan Ives, senior equity research analyst at Wedbush Securities. "We are in the top of the third inning of this AI game."

Enterprise moves

Jennifer Lawrence (not that one) is the new chief revenue officer at Redpanda, joining the data infrastructure company after sales leadership roles at Cisco and Duo Security.

Michelle MacCarthy is the new chief customer officer at Wrike, joining the workflow management company after customer-related leadership roles at Unit4 and Flexera.

Natalie Wolf is the new chief customer officer at People.ai, a promotion from her previous role as senior vice president of customer success.

The Runtime roundup

Hackers stole another ream of Salesforce customer data through a connection into the CRM giant from a third-party SaaS company, and this time around Gainsight appears to be the weak link.

Palo Alto Networks snapped up Chronosphere for $3.32 billion, the latest sign that observability software and security software are coming together at a rapid pace.

AI2 released the third generation of its open-source Olmo models, which let developers inspect and modify the models as needed and also allows them to see the training data that it uses to make decisions.

Thanks for reading — Runtime is off for the Thanksgiving holiday, see you Tuesday December 2nd in Las Vegas at re:Invent 2025!