Developers driving GDP growth in AI era: GitHub CEO

NEW DELHI: Developers are driving GDP growth and in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), India is set to surpass the US to become the largest software developer community globally by 2027, according to Thomas Dohmke, CEO of Microsoft-owned software development collaboration platform GitHub.

India is creating the digital public infrastructure (DPI) of the future with the help of millions of talented developers, fuelling economic growth.

At the ‘ET World Leaders Forum’ event in the national capital, he said that software developers are adopting AI faster than any other sector of the global workforce and for India, AI is the opening chapter of a “new book of opportunity”.

According to him, each company must embrace AI and become early adapters to unlock productivity entirely as AI is a solution to the problem.

AI developer productivity benefits could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion by 2030. A latest GitHub study revealed that 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.

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, according to Dohmke.

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