AI Engineer Panel: Sonar CEO Discusses Scaling AI Agents Beyond Process and Tooling
A panel at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 featuring Sonar CEO Tariq Shaukat and Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai explores why most AI agent deployments fail to deliver results. The discussion highlights three critical factors—process, tooling, and people—and outlines how trust in automated code workflows builds incrementally.
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This video recording from the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 features a panel moderated by McKinsey with Sonar CEO Tariq Shaukat and Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, former CEO of Gitar (now part of Sonar). The session addresses a common industry problem: while many companies have deployed AI agents, fewer than a third report tangible benefits.
Based on research conducted with Sonar, the speakers identify three areas that successful teams change: their process, their tooling, and crucially, their people and roles. Tariq Shaukat discusses why 'lighthouse teams' (pilot groups) alone are insufficient for spreading new habits across an organization. He emphasizes the need for engineers to make implicit knowledge explicit and to develop strong critical thinking skills, noting that AI outputs often sound confident regardless of accuracy.
Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai covers how large enterprises can adopt practices from smaller teams through their platform organizations. He details the step-by-step progression of building trust in AI-driven code workflows, moving from initial AI reviews to blocking issues, then to autofix capabilities, and finally to auto-approve and auto-merge processes. The episode is recommended for engineering leaders seeking to understand the organizational and human elements required to scale AI agents effectively.