How Carlsberg Uses GitHub Enterprise and Copilot to Unify Its Developer Platform

The Carlsberg Group is known for making beer, but its technical ambitions run considerably deeper. The company operates the Carlsberg Research Laboratory, which has contributed fundamental scientific advances — including the isolation of pure brewing yeast and the development of the pH scale — and distributes its portfolio of brands to 150 countries. Modern software development underpins everything from manufacturing automation to distribution logistics, making the state of Carlsberg’s engineering organization a strategic concern at the highest level.

When Peter Birkholm-Buch joined as Head of Software Engineering, he found a heterogeneous development landscape with no unifying platform. Engineers were navigating six different tools to build and ship software, forcing everyone to function as a part-time DevOps engineer just to publish code. The fragmentation had a predictable security side effect: developers under pressure to context-switch took shortcuts, embedding passwords and credentials directly in source code. The result was a codebase with hundreds of unknown secrets and an inability to enforce consistent security standards across teams.

Carlsberg’s response was consolidation. By migrating to GitHub Enterprise, the company reduced its toolchain from six systems to one, establishing a central platform engineering team responsible for eliminating friction for all developers. Infrastructure provisioning on Azure, code management, CI/CD pipelines, and security workflows now live in a single environment. GitHub Copilot was deployed organization-wide as soon as enterprise access became available, and the adoption was immediate and unanimous — developers who had tried it were unwilling to return to working without it. GitHub Advanced Security addressed the secrets problem directly: Secret Scanning surfaced approximately 600 unknown secrets embedded in private repositories, and Push Protection was configured to block new secrets from entering the codebase going forward. Automated security workflows in CI run comprehensive checks against container images and code with every pull request.

The outcomes were concrete. After a dedicated remediation effort, Carlsberg’s engineering organization reported zero known secrets in its code repositories and more than 30,000 security vulnerabilities removed since activating GitHub Advanced Security. GitHub Actions replaced a fragmented Jenkins CI/CD setup with a single flexible pipeline system that any team can contribute to regardless of their tech stack — a shift that Birkholm-Buch described as enabling a genuine culture of innersourcing, where cross-team contribution to shared pipelines became a normal expectation rather than an exceptional event. Copilot proved particularly valuable for reducing the learning curve when developers moved into unfamiliar languages or cloud platforms, which accelerated the company’s broader cloud migration.

Carlsberg’s experience illustrates the compounding returns of platform consolidation in large enterprise engineering organizations: fewer tools mean less context-switching, which means more time in deep work, which means faster delivery and fewer security shortcuts. With the platform foundation in place, the company is positioned to extend its engineering investment into AI-assisted development at scale, building on the productivity gains Copilot has already demonstrated across its 200-person software engineering team.