Global tech research company Gartner estimates that by 2028, 75 percent of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants, up from less than 10 percent in early 2023. As of the third quarter of 2023, 63 percent of organizations were piloting, deploying or had already deployed AI code assistants, said the survey of 598 software engineering leaders at large enterprises.
However, Philip Walsh, Gartner senior principal analyst, warns that there can be a mismatch between IT leadership's expectations and software teams' experience when it comes to productivity uptick. He said vendors selling AI-assisted coding tools were claiming they could increase coder productivity by as much as 50 percent, while a third of CIOs (34 percent) and technology leaders thought AI code generation might be a "game changer" for their software development efforts. "That's some really high expectations from the productivity gains from these AI code assistants," he said. While the popularity of AI coding tools will undoubtedly increase, development teams might need to manage the expectations of their senior managers ... 'They're not going to hear it from the vendors' But looking more closely at the vendors' claims reveals that the benefits of AI-powered coding tools can be confined to quite narrow tasks. For example, one study relied on an A-B style experiment where a team writing a web server in JavaScript was pitted against another that also employed AI coding tool