How do we shorten the gap between a finished Jira ticket and a deployed feature?

I’m running a small SaaS with five engineers on AWS. The coding part of our cycle is genuinely fast now, thanks to AI assistants. Then the ticket sits in review for two days, the pipeline flakes, SAST security scanning gets skipped because nobody wants to wait, and deployment happens whenever someone has a clear slot.

The bottleneck is clearly no longer code generation, it’s everything from PR raised to feature live.

What can I use to tighten up the post code part of the software delivery lifecycle without adding more process?