Driving AI Adoption in Product & Engineering at Edmunds GovTech

Bonsai Labs helped Private Equity portfolio company Edmunds GovTech to deploy AI into their SDLC process and drive adoption from non-existent to organization wide adoption. During the 6-week engagement, Edmunds GovTech already achieved significant productivity gains and delivered backlog items that were scheduled to take months.

At a glance

The company

Edmunds GovTech is a vertical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software leader that has powered local governments for nearly 50 years, serving municipalities, counties, utility authorities, fire districts, and other public entities across the United States. Edmunds GovTech is in the midst of a generational modernization, investing in Ethos, its next-generation web platform, as the foundation for the next era of service to its customers.

The challenge

When Bonsai Labs came in, AI adoption across Edmunds GovTech's product and engineering organization was low. Licenses acquired through the company's enterprise Microsoft agreement had never been operationalized there was no program, no shared tooling, and no proof point the teams trusted. For an organization carrying live commitments to thousands of public-sector customers, that caution was warranted: nobody was going to stake delivery dates on an unproven technology without evidence.

The cost of standing still was not hypothetical. Edmunds GovTech needed to accelerate its modernization without compromising the stability its customers depend on. Platform modernization is exacting work: it takes time, it has to be right, and it has to deliver measurable value to the customers running the platform today.

"The faster we can get a new product in our customers' hands, the more we're going to be able to protect our value and protect our reputation."
— Jason Bray, CPTO, Edmunds GovTech

Why Bonsai Labs

Edmunds GovTech evaluated three firms and wanted to decide within a week. What set Bonsai Labs apart was energy and responsiveness: Bonsai was the first to respond, the first to deliver a statement of work, and followed up constantly, while the other two firms did not send anything back until the last minute. That hunger, paired with a clearly knowledgeable team, is what drove the decision.

"You listened and showed you understood our problem deeply. You were the first one to get us a statement of work, the first one to respond, and you were following up constantly. The other companies were bigger, and they proved to me they were slower to move."
— Jason Bray, CPTO, Edmunds GovTech

The approach

Bonsai Labs didn't hand Edmunds GovTech a deck and a to-do list. They embedded with the team and built working AI capability into the way Edmunds GovTech operates, function by function, from Product Management to Engineering and Quality Assurance.

They won the product management team first. They became “believers” when Rony, Bonsai’s engineer, demonstrated a custom toolkit that took a written vision and carried it all the way through specifications, requirements, and design in a matter of minutes. Work that normally takes weeks or months happens right in front of them.

"You could see the lightbulb go off. They weren't believers, and now they're actually using these tools daily."
— Jason Bray, CPTO, Edmunds GovTech

Leadership by example: Originally a coder, Jason (CPTO) also dove in himself right away. After a session with Rony, he turned the Edmunds GovTech AI harness loose on one of their applications, and hours later had a click-through prototype of a redesigned experience in hand. The point was not to do the team's work for them, it was to lead from experience and coach with credibility.

Building a durable AI coding harness with Claude Code: From the start, the engagement was designed for durability. Bonsai left behind an AI coding harness designed around Claude Code, documented, extensible, and easy to replicate across all of Edmunds GovTech's codebases. Teams were also empowered to continue to extend and build their own skills into the harness.

"It's not like we bought a tool with limited capacity. We've been given knowledge and artifacts, and we can go do what we want with it. It's ours to own and ours to grow."
— Jason Bray, CPTO, Edmunds GovTech

The results

Engineering velocity

• Legacy modernization: A codebase upgrade estimated at a year for a full team; was completed by a single engineer in weeks.
• Tech debt: remediation work scoped in months closed out in days.
• UI build: 3 months of estimated work delivered in 3 days and headed to production.
• Mobile development: Starting from a skeptical team, Bonsai helped them complete a feature in 1 week instead of 3.
• 550+ days of development time reclaimed using the AI harness across customer-facing products.

Legacy requirements extraction

• Requirements extraction that once took a month or more per module dropped to 2-3 days, with a strong first-pass result.
• High-fidelity prototype generation as part of the requirements definition process.
• Entire modules that would take months to migrate can now be completed in days.

Quality and bug resolution

• In a single hackathon session, one engineer cleared four bugs in an hour roughly a day's worth of work through the previous process.
• AI surfaced four performance optimizations the team had not yet prioritized, with fixes shipped within 24 hours work that would otherwise have taken weeks.
• Code archaeology that once took weeks now takes minutes: locating the relevant code in a large legacy codebase in roughly ten minutes, with inefficiencies flagged automatically.

The throughline across all these wins is faster time-to-value getting working capability into customers' hands faster than the old process allowed.

Why it matters: value protection

For a business in Edmunds GovTech's position, the headline isn't just velocity it's enterprise value. The same work that clears tech debt and speeds delivery is ultimately about protecting and growing the revenue base: getting a better product into customers' hands faster, shortening time-to-value, and defending the company's reputation while it continues to grow.

"It's really protecting the customers, protecting our revenue base, and giving us the growth trajectory we want to see."
— Jason Bray, CPTO, Edmunds GovTech

Just as important, the transformation didn't walk out the door with the consultants. Edmunds GovTech's teams are now extending the work on their own, building new skills and operating with a mindset that assumes continuous change.

About Bonsai Labs

Bonsai Labs partners with Private Equity firms and their B2B Software portfolio to turn AI from experimentation into durable, owned capability. Embedding alongside teams in a forward-deployed model, they accelerate roadmaps and AI value creation plans, delivering results within weeks.