The company’s R&D and product leaders are rethinking software development and their own roles through their adoption of AI
Volaris Group is introducing the AI Accelerator in 2026, a program designed to upskill developers, product teams, and business leaders and help companies advance their AI maturity and fluency. We are profiling some of the businesses that have participated in the program and are moving away from AI experimentation to adoption and beyond.
Three days into the Volaris AI Accelerator event, Patricia Jacoby is noticing a shift in the room. The Director of R&D for equivant’s Court division has come to the hands-on bootcamp along with their product and developer teams, and what she’s witnessing is a pleasant surprise.
For equivant, a Volaris-owned company that builds court management software serving judiciary systems across North America, the AI Accelerator has arrived at a pivotal moment. The company started dipping its toes into the AI water in early 2025, working toward more serious adoption since then.
By the time they arrived at the AI Accelerator in spring 2026, they were looking for more ways to fully integrate AI tools into their teams.
AI is fun, and it takes care of all those boring tasks that your normal software developer just dislikes.
-Patricia Jacoby, Director of R&D, equivant Court
Her colleague Chris Dye, Director of Product for equivant’s Court division, made the trip as well, with a different vantage point. He oversees product strategy at the company, and has watched conversations with customers evolve from curiosity about AI as a buzzword into something more substantive.
Together, the two offer a portrait of what it looks like when a software company leans into AI adoption to transform the way they think about developing and iterating products in service of their customers in a vertical market.
R&D Perspective: From Agile to AI Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
For Jacoby, leading five development teams with roughly eight engineers each — plus a floating QA team — AI’s most immediate impact has been on the pace and structure of work itself. The Agile development cycle, with its sprints and release schedules, is being disrupted in ways she hadn’t anticipated.
“The speed at which we can resolve issues, the speed at which we can design new features, has increased so much that our current development cycles are being disrupted,” she explains. “We’re having to reimagine what a sprint looks like and what a release looks like.”
Even more notable to her is what AI is doing to team dynamics. She describes it as democratizing technical work in a way that even Agile methodology never fully achieved. With AI, the wall between developers and non-developers has started to come down.
AI opens that magical realm to every other department as well. Product managers now become wizards. The automation testers do more than just automate tasks. It opens the wizardry to everybody.
-Patricia Jacoby, Director of R&D, equivant Court
That shift has real implications for how equivant thinks about hiring. Jacoby says the company is no longer primarily looking for engineers who have memorized every syntax rule for .NET or Java. The new priority is people who understand the industry, know the customer base, and know how to deploy AI as a development tool.
“We’re going to start looking for people who understand how to work with AI more,” she says. “Your customer base becomes more important — as well as how to use AI to develop products for that customer base — than how much do you know in terms of this technical piece of work.”
Product Perspective: From Buzzword to Prototype
Dye’s journey into AI started a couple of years earlier, and it began with skepticism. The product leader recalls presenting at a Quadrants 2024 about his team’s evolution from “naysayers of AI” to adopters.
That growth arc has continued. Since then, one of his product managers has built an internal AI platform called equivant Intelligence that integrates with their Zendesk and Jira systems, built using Claude to function almost like a senior colleague.
[Our internal AI platform] frees up my senior people to keep doing what they have to focus on. And my new people can ask the system the questions and get the answers that they need.
-Chris Dye, Director of Product Management, equivant Court
The session that was most transformational to him at the AI Accelerator was the introduction to vibe coding, where product leaders used AI to rapidly prototype functional software directly from their own ideas.
Most product leaders would normally have had to describe features of a prototype in a spec document, and then wait months to see it built — so having the ability to mock up a working interface in real time through vibe coding now represents a fundamentally different way that the product team can work with customers.
What the vibe coding does is it helps us create a prototype that we can show to the customer, and then get their feedback right away. By the time they get the product, it’s exactly what they were looking at.
-Chris Dye, Director of Product Management, equivant Court
He’s also candid about his own learning curve. Despite having internal AI champions on his team, Dye admits he sometimes felt a fear of being left behind by the new technologies. He describes watching colleagues explore AI tools and worrying — as he says with a laugh now — that he was becoming his father, who struggled when being shown how to use an iPhone for the first time.
The AI Accelerator helped him overcome that mental barrier: “This week has been actually really great because the stuff I was a little unsure about, it’s helped me get over that hurdle.”
Building their Proof of Concept
The project that equivant brought to work on at the AI Accelerator reflects the complexity of their domain. Court filings, once submitted, must be reviewed and accepted by the court before entering the official record. In the pre-digital era, reporters could rifle through a physical basket of pending filings to stay informed. That access disappeared with digitization, and now some news agencies are suing courts to get it back.
equivant’s proof of concept aims to recreate a “virtual basket”: a public-facing view of unaccepted filings that preserves transparency while automatically redacting personally identifiable information such as social security numbers, dates of birth, and other sensitive data that courts are obligated to protect.
The AI Accelerator gave the team the tools they needed and structured time to begin building that prototype. Using sessions on spec-driven development and setup workshops, they were able to move from concept to working code faster than would have been possible through their normal cycle. Customers were even emailing the team about the solution while they were still building it, says Dye.
Charting a Path to ROI
Both Jacoby and Dye see a clear path to return on investment, even though all the tangible benefits are still emerging and being measured.
Jacoby frames the gains in terms of raw capacity. Where one developer used to represent one unit of output, AI significantly multiplies the possibilities for output.
“AI resources can represent ten times the number of resources than one resource would normally be,” she says. “We can now be more market disruptive. We now have the ability to really go do all that cool stuff.”
Dye takes a similar view but adds a second dimension related to his product focus: new growth, in addition to efficiency. He sees efficiency gains as the first wave, and validated prototypes — built quickly, tested against market feedback, then placed on a product roadmap — as the second.
Lessons to Take Back to the Business
The AI Accelerator has been a catalyst for both leaders to plan concrete next steps.
Jacoby intends to formally redefine equivant Court’s software development lifecycle and retrain her teams on the new workflows. Her advice to developers? “Let AI do the boring stuff for you, and you concentrate on the cool stuff.”
If you want to remain relevant in software development, you need to embrace AI. It’s kind of like the industrial revolution — you can’t keep doing things the old way and expect to succeed.
-Patricia Jacoby, Director of R&D, equivant Court
Meanwhile, Dye is focused on coaching his team through the transition and establishing their technical foundation — making sure Claude, GitHub, and their other tools talk to each other properly, and that a designated internal champion can support everyone else through setup.
For the team at equivant, the AI Accelerator hasn’t answered every question they have. But it has fundamentally changed the questions they’re asking and pushed them in a direction where they are working to drive new possibilities for their business using AI to power further growth.
