From Bottleneck to Breakthrough: How AI Helped Us Reclaim Performance and Redefine IT’s Role

By Virginia Fletcher, CIO, and Zac Harlan, Chief Architect

On Thursday, June 10th, something familiar happened in our technology organization: a legacy system became a bottleneck. But what happened next was anything but typical.

Our engineering team was troubleshooting a severe slowdown in our order management system. Sales fulfillment had come to a standstill. The root cause? A long-forgotten, monolithic section of database logic, bloated, brittle, and untouched for years. Everyone knew of it. No one dared touch it. It was a classic example of legacy tech debt creating operational risk.

In the past, we might have spent hours, even days, working through manual code reviews, trial-and-error fixes, and performance tests. But this time, we tried something different: we brought AI into the process.

Using GitHub Copilot, our engineers broke the problem apart, literally. With a series of smart prompts, Copilot helped dissect the massive codebase into smaller, understandable, and testable units. In just 15 minutes, we had clarity. We had options. And we had confidence.

The team quickly refactored the logic using modern design patterns optimized for high-volume data. The results were staggering with a 99.6% improvement in performance. What once halted fulfillment now ran smoothly, without friction. 

But the real breakthrough wasn’t just technical, it was cultural.

As the team collaborated with the AI, they taught and learned from each other. Engineers new to Copilot got real-world experience. Seasoned developers modeled better practices. We didn’t just fix code, we built capability. We didn’t just ship performance, we elevated the team.

From Reactive to Proactive: AI as a Force Multiplier

This wasn’t an isolated incident, it was a window into the future of IT. One where AI isn’t a side tool; it’s a force multiplier. One where support tickets and system firefighting aren’t our default mode of work. One where IT resources shift from reacting to problems to anticipating and preventing them.

AI is helping us rewrite that script.

With tools like Copilot, we’re empowering engineers to move faster and smarter. We’re using AI-driven observability to spot anomalies before they become incidents. We’re embedding machine learning into our infrastructure to optimize workloads, predict failures, and continuously tune performance.

Rebalancing IT: Less Firefighting, More Forward Momentum

By rethinking how we solve problems and where we invest our effort, we’re also reshaping the role of the technology organization.  This means, fewer cycles wasted on root cause analysis and brittle code fixes.  More time spent on product, growth, and innovation.  Ultimately, it is a reduced support burden and a stronger, more agile balance sheet

This is what it looks like to evolve from legacy chaos to AI-powered performance. And it doesn’t happen just through tools. It happens through mindset, architecture, and a willingness to let AI augment human expertise.

We’re not just fixing old problems faster. We’re building a technology organization that’s ready to lead, proactively, strategically, and collaboratively.

Why This Matters for CIOs and Business Leaders Alike

For CIOs, this is about more than efficiency, it’s about relevance. AI enables us to elevate IT from a support function to a strategic enabler. When we remove friction from the system, we free up our teams to focus on what drives growth: better products, faster delivery, stronger security, and smarter use of data.

For business leaders, the payoff is clear: fewer disruptions, faster response to market needs, and a tech organization aligned to the business outcomes that matter most. It's how we move from keeping the lights on to powering the future.