5X FASTER BACKEND DEVELOPMENT FOR ONE OF BRAZIL'S LEADING DIGITAL BANKS

Agentic workflows accelerated backend development cycles by up to 5x, cut technical refinement meetings from weeks down to just 1-2 hours, and reduced the time to develop a user story from 5 days to 1 day without compromising quality, testing, or human oversight.

INTRODUCTION

In an increasingly competitive financial services market, the speed of value delivery has become a strategic differentiator. One of Brazil's leading digital banks faced this challenge head-on, needing to accelerate the delivery of business solutions without compromising the quality, compliance, and human control required in a regulated financial environment.

To address this, the organization partnered with CI&T to rethink two critical stages of its software development lifecycle, focusing on technical refinement and backend implementation. Powered by CI&T Flow, specialized AI agents were embedded directly into these workflows, combining intelligent automation with human oversight at every step.

The result was a new delivery model that accelerated backend development by up to 5x and turned weeks of refinement meetings into a few hours of focused collaborative work.

THE CHALLENGE: ACCELERATING DELIVERY WITHOUT COMPROMISING CONTROL

Overcoming development and refinement bottlenecks while maintaining the governance, quality, and human oversight required in a highly regulated environment.

Lengthy Backend Development Cycles

Core development activities required significant manual effort, slowing down delivery speed and reducing overall engineering throughput.

Slow and Meeting-Heavy Technical Refinement

Translating business requirements into complete technical specifications required multiple rounds of meetings between business and technical teams, a process that often stretched on for weeks before development could even begin.

Accelerating Without Losing Control

As with any financial institution, the organization needed to increase delivery speed while preserving rigor around testing, code coverage, compliance, and human oversight at critical checkpoints.

THE SOLUTION

Powered by Flow, CI&T implemented two connected agentic workflows designed to accelerate technical refinement and backend implementation while maintaining human oversight throughout the process.

Collaborative Technical Refinement

The first workflow follows a human-in-the-loop model, where business and technical teams collaborate in real time with the support of an AI agent. Instead of long, asynchronous meeting cycles, teams work together to produce a complete technical specification, a "spec-kit," ready to guide implementation, in a fraction of the time.

Autonomous Backend Implementation

Starting from a validated spec-kit, a second agent takes over execution autonomously, preparing the development environment, delegating implementation tasks, and validating tests for coverage and compliance with defined standards. When execution succeeds, the agent generates a final consolidated report. When it doesn't, it creates its own correction tasks and, after three unsuccessful attempts, escalates to a human for intervention, ensuring automation never operates without a safety net.

THE IMPACT

The initiative delivered significant improvements across both technical refinement and backend development.

5X FASTER BACKEND DEVELOPMENT

Development time for a user story was reduced from five days to one day.

Backend delivery cycles
became 5x faster

TECHNICAL REFINEMENT REDUCED TO HOURS

Technical refinement was reduced from a process that could take weeks to just one or two hours

Faster collaboration between business and technology teams helped accelerate the transition from requirements to development

MORE EFFICIENT SOFTWARE DELIVERY

Reduced manual effort across refinement and backend development

Human oversight maintained at critical stages of the process

Faster progression from business requirements to implementation

TECHNOLOGIES USED

AGENTIC BUS

An orchestration layer that enables specialized AI agents to collaborate across engineering workflows, reducing handoffs and creating continuous delivery flows.

POWERED BY FLOW

CI&T Flow Enterprise AI Management System that integrates intelligent agents into software delivery processes, enabling organizations to accelerate execution, improve engineering productivity, and maintain governance and quality standards at scale.

SPECIALIZED AI AGENTS

Purpose-built agents supporting business analysis, technical leadership, development, and workflow coordination activities.

HUMAN-IN-THE-LOOP GOVERNANCE

A framework that combines AI automation with human oversight, ensuring transparency, quality, and accountability throughout the delivery lifecycle.