What Does AI Across the SDLC Actually Look Like at a Brokerage Firm?

There is no shortage of articles about AI in software development. Most of them talk in abstractions. "AI will transform engineering." "Copilot increases productivity." "The future of development is AI-assisted." None of that helps you if you are an engineering leader at a brokerage firm trying to figure out what this actually looks like on a Monday morning when your team sits down to work on the trading platform. This article is the practical version. Every phase of the software development lifecycle, mapped to what AI does and does not do in a brokerage engineering environment. No theory. No hype. Just what we have seen work across financial services engineering teams at Wednesday Solutions . The Starting Point Most People Get Wrong Most engineering leaders start their AI adoption journey by picking a tool. They evaluate Copilot vs Cursor vs Claude Code. They run a pilot with 5 engineers. They ask those engineers if they feel more productive. The engineers say yes. The leader rolls i