At Dovetail, our mission has always been to improve the quality of every thing, by helping our customers truly understand the people they’re building for.
This philosophy of understanding is at the core of how we operate, and it extends to how we build our own product. We're constantly seeking ways to improve our craft so we can deliver a more powerful, intuitive, and delightful experience. Today, I want to share a behind-the-scenes look at how we're embracing AI not just in our product, but in the very way we build it.
Doug Rathbone is VP of Engineering at Dovetail.
Our journey with AI isn't new. For several years, we’ve been building AI-native features into Dovetail to help our customers be more productive than ever. At the same time, our engineering teams have been using AI coding assistants to ship our software faster and more reliably. These tools became trusted partners, helping us streamline individual tasks. But we felt we could be doing so much more if we made mastery a priority.
Rebooting our craft with agents
The real shift began in early 2025. We’d been experimenting with new development and design tooling that moved beyond simple code completion. We delved into "agentic coding" or “vibe coding” with platforms like Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot’s emerging agent-based features. Our more CLI-focused engineers even found success with tools like Aider.
The release of models like Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro and Anthropic's Claude 4 family marked a significant turning point. Their larger context windows and sophisticated reasoning unlocked new capabilities for our product teams. Overnight, these tools could do more than help an engineer write a single function or a designer create an isolated screen, they could understand the broader context of our codebase and design system. This enabled agents to reason through complex engineering problems and generate entire user flows, acting as a true collaborator in both the creative and development processes.
This change wasn’t just incremental; it was a step-function improvement in our ability to build and innovate.
Introducing "Project Flash"
Recognizing the potential untapped customer value, we went all in. We launched an internal initiative called "Project Flash," named for the DC superhero who moves at the speed of light. The goal is ambitious yet simple: to empower our entire product and engineering team to build most of Dovetail alongside AI agents by the end of September 2025.
The results have been transformative. Since focusing our efforts towards mastery as a goal, we've seen a dramatic acceleration in our ability to deliver value to customers. This isn't just about raw speed. With AI agents helping generate high-fidelity prototypes, write product specs, and handle boilerplate code, our entire team can focus more on what matters most: the problem-solving and collaboration that leads to breakthrough features. The quality of our work has improved across the board, and we're even able to deploy AI-powered Slack bots that help us respond to customer feedback and fix bugs faster than ever.
Our principles for building with AI
As we harness the power of AI, we are guided by a number of principles to ensure we do so responsibly and effectively:
Put the customer first:
Every AI-driven optimization is aimed at improving the experience our customers have using our products. We use AI to help us prototype, test, and ship valuable features to you faster.
Your data is sacred:
This is a foundational principle, codified in our AI Usage Policy. We do not, and will not, use customer data to train any of our internal or third-party AI models.
Security and privacy are paramount:
We take a structured approach to AI governance, recently underscored by our ISO 42001 certification. We use enterprise-grade AI tools with contractual commitments that our proprietary code and customer data is never used for training, ensuring our intellectual property remains protected.
Beyond engineering: A company-wide transformation
Our commitment to AI extends beyond our product and engineering teams. Everyone at Dovetail already had access to the latest and best AI tooling, but our leverage of them wasn't universal. Early in the year we held a company-wide "AI Week," providing training for every team member on using AI tools to enhance productivity and creativity in their roles.
This transformation has taken root across the company. Our data team is using AI to accelerate business reporting, while our marketing and people teams leverage it for content creation, planning and ideation, and workflow optimization. This company-wide adoption ensures we're all operating more effectively, freeing up time for more strategic work that benefits our customers.
The future of customer intelligence
This journey is teaching us a lot about the future of work. We believe that being world-class in the age of AI means mastering these new tools and integrating them thoughtfully into our workday. For us, AI is not about replacing human creativity but augmenting and accelerating it. It's about empowering our talented team to do their best work and, in turn, to deliver more value to you more quickly, safely, and delightfully than ever before.
We're incredibly excited about what's ahead, and we'll continue to share our learnings as we build the future of Dovetail as the world's leading customer intelligence platform, with our customers and AI partners right by our side.
Haven't tried Dovetail yet? Get started today or request a demo from our sales team.
