New Way Now: How Thales is rapidly increasing development velocity with Gemini Code Assist

*Featured in this video:* Ashvin Kamaraju, Global VP, Engineering and Cloud Operations, and Alain Michaud, Engineering CTO, Thales Cyber Security Products *Executive summary:* Thales, an advanced security and digital identity provider, is on a mission to build a future that’s based on trust. To counter rapidly evolving threats, Thales Cybersecurity Products division adopted an AI-forward approach using Gemini Code Assist and Gemini CLI. By integrating Gemini into CI/CD pipelines and the full software development lifecycle, Thales is eliminating the technical debt and engineering toil, allowing developers to focus on building more secure products at unprecedented speeds. *Challenge:* Cybersecurity threats change almost daily. Thales engineers needed to innovate faster to mitigate these emerging threats, but they were often slowed down by significant technical debt and mundane tasks. This meant that traditional development timelines for complex security features could span anywhere from months to over a year. Beyond speed, the toil of repetitive coding tasks led to frequent context switching, which impacted both developer satisfaction and the overall efficiency of the engineering organization. *Solution:* Thales expanded its long-standing relationship with Google by deploying Gemini Code Assist and Gemini CLI across its cybersecurity business line. The team focused on an AI-first software development lifecycle, where AI takes on the repetitive, low-value scaffolding work, freeing engineers to move higher up the value chain and apply the creativity and engineering judgment that truly delivers value to customers. A key differentiator for Thales was the extensibility of Gemini CLI, which allowed engineering teams to plug the tool directly into their specific workflows and custom CI/CD pipelines. This integration aims to shrink the entire development cycle, from ideation through deployment, ensuring that security solutions reach the market while the threats they addres