Three in five organizations see innovative work as the biggest benefit of generative AI use in software engineering; software professionals say generative AI will boost their comms with business teams
www.capgemini.com/, Jul. 10, 2024 –
Generative AI (Gen AI) is expected to play a key role in augmenting the software workforce, assisting in more than 25% of software design, development, and testing work in the next two years. According to the Capgemini Research Institute's latest report "Turbocharging software with generative AI: How organizations can realize the full potential of generative AI for software engineering", a large majority (80%) of software professionals believe that, by automating simpler repetitive tasks, Gen AI tools and solutions will significantly transform their function, freeing up time for them to focus on higher-value-adding tasks. More than three quarters of software professionals are confident that generative AI has the potential to boost collaboration with non-technical business teams.
While the generative AI adoption for software engineering is still in its early stages, with 9 in 10 organizations yet to scale, the report found that organizations with active Gen AI initiatives are already reaping multiple benefits from its adoption — fostering innovation coming first place (61% of organizations surveyed) followed by improving software quality (49%). They saw also an improvement of between 7 to 18% (on average) in the productivity[1] of their software engineering functions. For certain specialized tasks, time saving was as high as 35%.
Organizations surveyed highlighted that they plan to leverage the additional time freed up by generative AI for innovative work such as developing new software features (50%) and upskilling (47%); while reducing headcount being the least-adopted route (just 4% of responding organizations). New roles, such as generative AI developer, prompt writers or generative AI architect are also emerging.
Improved collaboration between tech and business teams
From better communication to explaining what the code is doing in natural language, Gen AI makes the connection between software engineers and other business teams more effective. 78% of software professionals are optimistic about Gen AI's potential to enhance collaboration.