Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
Software developers will AI anything once, and according to Arun Chandrasekaran, a distinguished VP analyst at Gartner who was fielding questions at the company’s IT Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, Florida, last week, they’re “driving the adoption of AI in most enterprises today.”
Chandrasekaran offered up two main reasons why: Software developers are frequently eager to try new tech, and software development still has plenty of confidence-inspiring humans involved in enterprise coding scenarios.
“When AI is being used to generate code, you still have a developer that is looking at the code and saying, ‘Hey, this is good code and this is bad code,’” Chandrasekaran said.
What makes you say that? A Jan. 2024 Gartner webinar polled its audience of 1,299 attendees and found that 17% of respondents said software teams adopted or intended to adopt a GenAI tool. Software development usage surpassed all other business-function deployments, including customer service (16%), marketing (14%), and sales (12%).
Additional Gartner surveys found 60% of surveyed CIOs are being tasked with an AI strategy, and half of enterprise GenAI deployments are “focused on augmenting employees to increase productivity.”
“Where would developers bring AI? Of course, they would bring AI to enhance their own productivity and enhance their own value within the organization,” Chandrasekaran said.
HelpGPT Stephen Bennett, director of the cloud native applications practice at Soliant Consulting, uses GenAI tools when a project requires integration of a new API. Tools like CodeWhipserer and ChatGPT help the consultancy—a mainly Node.js shop—easily work with other languages.
“I don't want to turn my developers over into C# developers and ask them to learn another language. But there may be tools out there that can help us. So, we ask the GenAI, ‘Hey, can you show me a path forward for wrapping a C# library in Node.js to be able to utilize it,’” Bennett said, while also noting a hard and fast rule: What is generated needs to be reviewed and not directly copied and pasted into a code base.
A survey from software development company BairesDev, completed in July 2024, found that 72% of 509 engineer respondents leverage GenAI in their software development process, using tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft CoPilot. Forty percent of engineers, however, reported not believing GenAI freed up time for them to accomplish other tasks.
Bennett did note a “split” between developers eager to use generative AI and those who’d rather not.
“You have the set of folks who are always looking to implement and leverage new technology and functionalities in their day to day work life. And then you have the set of folks who are just reluctant to that change,” Bennett said.
Chandrasekaran sees a willingness in software developers—one half of them, at least—to embrace a new technology.
“We truly believe that software development is one of the business functions, where there will be significantly higher adoption of AI,” he said. “Why? Because, generally speaking, developers are always quick to latch onto new technologies and new tools.”