Cortex, co-founded by Ganesh Datta, introduces DRIVE, a framework designed to measure and improve engineering organizational health amidst AI adoption. The framework assesses effectiveness across five pillars: Delivery, Reliability, Initiatives, Vigilance, and Efficiency. It addresses the accelerating pace of software development driven by AI, arguing that traditional developer productivity metrics are insufficient.

DRIVE focuses on the operational layer, measuring how sustainably an organization turns customer needs into reliable software. Critical metrics include deploy frequency, lead time for changes, on-call pager volume, functional SLO status, incident counts, initiative milestone completion, CVEs, and cloud/LLM token costs. This contrasts with metrics focused solely on code writing speed, which AI is rapidly automating.

The framework's practical application lies in its recurring Operational Excellence review. This leadership ritual treats the engineering organization as a complex system, using DRIVE measurements to inform resource allocation and identify areas for improvement. The goal is to establish organizational "backpressure" – the controls and signals needed to maintain stability as AI accelerates output.