AI developer productivity can boost global GDP by $1.5 trillion by 2030

BENGALURU, Artificial intelligence (AI) developer productivity benefits could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion by 2030, a report showed on Wednesday.

According to Microsoft-owned software development collaboration platform GitHub, users accept nearly 30 per cent of code suggestions from GitHub Copilot and report increased productivity from these acceptances within the first year in the market.

Using the 30 per cent productivity enhancement, with a projected number of 45 million professional developers in 2030, generative AI developer tools could add productivity gains of an additional 15 million “effective developers” to worldwide capacity by 2030.

This could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion, a boon in economic activity generated by this one group of workers, according to an analysis on a large sample of GitHub Copilot users (934,533).

“The economic impact of generative AI over the next decade will be profound — and we’re already seeing large-scale adoption of AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot by developers and companies,” said Thomas Dohmke, GitHub CEO.

In a recent survey, 92 per cent of developers said they use AI tools both in and outside of work, which underscores how quickly these tools are redefining the overall developer experience.

GitHub Copilot has been activated by more than one million developers and adopted by over 20,000 organisations.

It has generated over three billion accepted lines of code, and is the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool.

GitHub found that over time, the acceptance rate steadily increased as developers became more familiar with the tool.

“What we draw from all this is that generative AI is turbocharging developer productivity with gains that will ultimately drive a boom in GDP for the global economy and, in turn, a surge in demand for software developers,” said Dohmke.

Over 100 million people, including developers from 90 of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to build amazing things together across more than 330 million repositories.