In a survey of over a thousand CIOs, CTOs, CISOs and other tech execs conducted by Protiviti, organizations spend an average of 30% of their total IT budgets on managing technical debt. Not only is it costly, but nearly 70% felt that technical debt highly impacted their ability to innovate.

Technical debt happens to organizations of all stripes and sizes, and while some may take solace in knowing they’re not alone, it’s no less devastating. Many point the finger at their engineering teams because it’s easy to do, but they’re not the real culprit. You’ll often find it results from poor developer experience (DX) due to years of non-technical leadership prioritizing the product roadmap over anything else. This can cause productivity to suffer and culture to turn toxic. Focusing on developer work environments offers a solution for organizations struggling with technical debt. An important part is providing advanced AI tools that reward the developer and company with growth.

An Undisputed Champion

Software development teams need a DX champion. This senior engineer can track the time a new developer may need to create their own environment. If it takes too long, the DX champ will dig in and work alongside the developer to tighten that window.

Consider the onboarding of a new developer, which is historically not always the best process. It could take weeks for a new developer to offer a simple patch or minor feature, only to render a continuous integration (CI) service unresponsive. The DX leader then needs to step back and evaluate because this could result from a less-than-well-written test suite, which the new developer did not cause.

Existing teams may be okay working with aged technology, but a step back like this can disappoint someone accustomed to modern tools. Remember that tools like CircleCI can help determine if a test is flaky. A DX champion will address this need and halt activities following each sprint to ensure code is clean and reusable moving forward.

Measure Often

A DX champion should be in tune with a company’s morale. Regular surveys can reveal if a developer is finding gratification in their work. There’s also employee turnover and specific projects that cause issues to consider. And if you want developers to stay, you have to show their concerns are being heard.

There are trackable metrics to understand technical debt and its impact, one being “time to fix.” Let’s say there’s a fixable bug: Tools do exist to measure how long resolution takes from code through completion. This could show that a minor patch took two days to ship, which should be done in hours. This insight will enable the DX champion to spearhead corrections and ensure their teams have the right technology.

Not So Secret Agents

For developers, it’s all about coding. Tools should help push projects into production, not create bottlenecks. While AI tooling can cut tremendous amounts of time, teams must set standards regarding the acceptable level of tech debt. So, a DX champion should candidly discuss acceptable debt and code quality to get their team’s buy-in.

Increasingly, organizations are deploying AI agents supported by engineer orchestration. The World Economic Forum recently projected that by 2028, a third of all enterprise software apps will include AI agents. Additionally, up to 90% of businesses now view agentic AI as a possible competitive advantage that bolsters efficiency, scale and decision making. If a report shows a small bug that AI agents can correct, this can free up developers to tackle more rewarding, higher-value tasks.

Still, it’s not something you can set and forget—human oversight is needed to monitor things and make decisions that AI cannot be trusted to make.

Make Them Happy

It’s no secret that there will be times when your organization must immediately get a product out the door. It might have weak scalability and degrade over time, but try as they may, developers will never fully correct this situation. And when this becomes a way of doing business, technical debt spirals out of control, so make them happy now.

Getting your culture right is critical, or you’ll lose a lot of money. Every company can allocate a few hours each week to strengthen the DX. And, they should be able to name a DX champion that’ll keep things on track. You can invest a little now to make developers happy, or pay more later in stalled innovation, slow performance, security headaches and limited ability to compete in the future.