75% Enterprise Software Engineers Will Use AI Code Assistants By 2028: Gartner
AI code assistants enable more capabilities beyond code generation and completion.
By 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use artificial intelligence code assistants, up from less than 10% in early 2023, according to research and consulting firm Gartner. Sixty-three percent of organisations are currently piloting, deploying or have already deployed AI code assistants, according to the Gartner survey of global respondents.
AI code assistants enable more capabilities beyond code generation and completion. They are collaborative assistants that can improve developers’ efficiency by stimulating brainstorming and increasing code quality enhancements, which allows developers to upskill and build proficiency in programming frameworks. The enablers offered by AI code assistants can lead to increased job satisfaction and retention, thereby saving the costs associated with turnover, Gartner said.
“Software engineering leaders must determine ROI and build a business case as they scale their rollouts of AI code assistants,” said Philip Walsh, senior principal analyst at Gartner. “However, traditional ROI frameworks steer engineering leaders toward metrics centred on cost reduction. This narrow perspective fails to capture the full value of AI code assistants.”
Traditional ROI frameworks fail to capture the full value of AI code assistants. To derive value beyond traditional ROI metrics, software engineering leaders must reframe the ROI conversation from cost reduction to value generation.
While organisations can derive values such as time savings, faster coding and cost reduction, there are hidden values that AI code assistants can provide. According to Gartner, these include reduced task switching and maintained flow state, enhanced developer experience, improved developer retention, improved code quality and maintainability, better customer experience, less bugs and technical debt, and faster go-to-market.
“Calculating time savings on code generation is a good place to begin building a more robust value story. To convey the full enterprise value story for AI code assistants, software engineering leaders should connect value enablers to impacts, and then analyse the overall return to the organisation,” said Walsh.
