The analyst firm Gartner has predicted that 75% of all enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants by the year 2028. This is compared to just 10% who used these tools in early 2023.
A survey conducted by Gartner of 598 global companies in the third quarter of 2023 found that 63% of organizations were already piloting, deploying, or have deployed AI code assistants. While there is concern that these code assistants could reduce the number of heads needed, they also lead to increased job satisfaction and retention, according to the analyst.
Many organizations are looking at code assistants in quite a limited way according to Gartner. This limited view focuses on faster coding, time savings, and cost reduction. It said, however, that there are other benefits that aren’t as well known including reducing task switching and maintaining flow state, enhancing the developer experience, improving developer retention, improving code quality and maintainability, improving the customer experience, reducing bugs and technical debt, and going to market faster.
Just this week, two major integrated developer environments, or IDEs, have received pretty big updates to their AI code assistants. The first was Google’s launch of Gemini for Android Studio which replaces Studio Bot, and the second was the announcement of the unified Copilot experience coming to Visual Studio 17.10 which combines the features of Copilot and Copilot Chat.
While these tools will no doubt help people get their job done faster, it could also lead to job displacement. Recently, the staffing provider Adecco Group released new data which shows that many companies will be hiring less people over the next five years due to generative AI.
While fewer hires will surely lead to less costs for businesses, it also raises the question of what will happen to their revenues when more people are out of work as a result with no income.
Source: Gartner
5 Comments - Add comment