GitHub for Leaders: Climbing the agentic ladder from assistance to orchestration
How Visma’s developers moved from AI assistance to agentic supervision, delegation, and beyond.
In this episode of GitHub for Leaders, host Anjuan Simmons speaks with Alex Lystad, Chief Technology Officer at Visma, to discuss how a company with thousands of engineers climbed the "agentic ladder"—and how leaders can begin the same climb right now.
How Visma scaled AI use to nearly 100% [00:18–1:18]
The conversation opens with Alex tracing Visma's four-year journey up what the company calls the “agentic ladder.” As an existing large GitHub customer, Visma was able to distribute GitHub Copilot broadly and quickly, beginning with simple code suggestions. Since then, the company has moved from AI assistance to agent delegation, and today practically 100% of Visma developers use AI tools daily.
Delegating implementation to Copilot agents [1:18–2:17]
Alex describes how several teams and companies within Visma now delegate to agents, rather than writing code—an explicit organizational goal. This has led to a fundamental shift in how developers spend their time: instead of manually typing code, they instruct agents and manage the information environment those agents work in.
Rethinking code review with GitHub Copilot Code Review [2:17–4:29]
Alex also provides insight into how AI review—now running before peer review—has reshaped the human conversation around code. With Copilot Code Review reviewing roughly 65% of new code at Visma, lower risk details like naming conventions and stylistic notes are handled by agents, leaving peer review to concentrate on higher-risk questions of correctness and long-term sustainability. Alex also notes how Copilot Code Review can surface functional bugs that human reviewers miss, and review agents can be built directly into the team of agents handling implementation.
Tangible results and moving bottlenecks [4:29–6:58]
Next, the conversation shifts to outcomes otherwise impossible without Copilot. Technology modernizations like moving to .NET 9, for example, once took years and now take months, while small mobile apps can ship in days. Alex explains that as delivery accelerates, the bottleneck simply moves from development to product. One Visma company cleared its entire first-quarter roadmap and had to shift capacity toward deciding what to build next.
Building from delegation to orchestration [6:58–11:00]
As the discussion wraps up, Alex maps the full ladder—assistance, supervision, delegation, and orchestration—and explains that as developers move up the ladder, their role expands and becomes more valuable and strategic. Most developers at Visma multiply their impact by delegating tasks to Copilot agents running in parallel, but Alex is already looking forward to orchestration. With orchestration, the agentic system can be responsible for an entire stream of work. For example, ingesting security findings, customer bug reports, and production logs, testing whether each is a real problem, and proposing a fix, with a human deciding whether the change makes sense.
Alex advises leaders to clarify and communicate what good looks like, set clear goals, and enable teams through hands-on practice—as Visma has done by putting 4,000 engineers through upskilling programs on their own code bases.
👉 Whether its accelerated code modernization and software delivery, more impactful code review, or time to think about what’s next, this episode offers insight into how climbing the agentic ladder with Copilot offers your teams real-world results.
Ready to move up the agentic ladder? Explore how GitHub Copilot's agentic features help teams delegate implementation work and keep humans focused on the decisions that matter.