Measuring the Real Impact of AI on Engineering Teams

The Challenge & Solution

Ekolabs AI was engaged as AI Solutions Architect and Technical Coach for Payphone, a leading FinTech platform serving over 750,000 users across the Americas, to implement AI-assisted development tooling and measure its real impact on engineering productivity and code quality. Over a six-week pilot, the team adopted Anthropic's Claude Code under structured coaching. Rather than simply increasing output volume, the AI fundamentally transformed how the team allocated effort: routine tasks were completed 20% faster, freeing capacity that was reinvested into complex problem-solving (27% more time on difficult tasks) and quality improvements. Test coverage nearly doubled (26% to 47% of commits including tests), pull request sizes decreased by 47%, and the QA engineer produced 504 new performance tests that had previously been considered infeasible. Ekolabs introduced the proprietary AIDA (Asymmetric Impact of Developer AI-Assistance) framework to make these distributional changes visible, moving beyond traditional metrics that would have missed the real value created. The results led the client to extend the engagement to accelerate development across additional teams.