Number of Developers in India Is Growing, Era of Artificial Intelligence Has Begun: GitHub CEO

India’s growing developer community coupled with newfound artificial intelligence capabilities will not only accelerate digital transformation but will drive tremendous human and economic progress in the country, said Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform.

The platform revealed that over 15.4 million developers use GitHub in India, up 33% year-on-year (YoY). India is set to overtake the US as the largest developer community on GitHub by 2027.

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“Where there are software developers, there is economic growth. By 2027, India will overtake the United States to become the largest software community on Earth. This alone signals incredible prosperity to come, but there is more to it than that. At the same time that the developer population in India is growing rapidly, the era of artificial intelligence has begun,” Dohmke said during his address to technology leaders at GitHub Galaxy Bengaluru.

He said developers are already 55 percent faster using Copilot’s AI coding assistant, which means the software economy, valued in the trillions globally, is growing much faster thanks to AI.

“India will not only be a global leader, but also a global leader in the era of artificial intelligence. Both children and adults will learn coding in their native language, which will lead to a long-term influx of programmers,” Dohmke said. He said creativity in Indian open source will flourish with a spring of artificial intelligence innovations and start-ups. Indian companies will gain a competitive advantage in the global market as their developers will create software with increased coding speed.

GitHub was acquired in 2018 by Microsoft in a $7.5 billion stock deal. More than 100 million people, including developers at more than 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaboratively build products and services across 420 million repositories.

Enterprises using artificial intelligence

Today, GitHub Copilot has 1.8 million paid subscribers and has been deployed by over 50,000 organizations around the world. In India, GitHub revealed that it continues to see the adoption of its Copilot-based platform by companies across industries, including Cognizant, MakeMyTrip and Paytm, resulting in a surge in productivity and the pace of innovation across these companies.

Prasad Sankaran, executive vice president of software engineering and platforms at technology company Cognizant, said that since implementing GitHub Copilot, the company has seen greater productivity and improved software quality, and its developers have been able to deliver software ahead of the competition. So far, Cognizant’s Synapse skills program has trained 35,000 Cognizant developers on GitHub Copilot, with an additional 40,000 developers expected to be trained. “We’ve seen the impact that AI can bring, and we’re committed to ensuring our developers can use GitHub Copilot at scale. It is a proven tool that can deliver massive productivity gains and unlock innovation in completely new ways,” said Sankaran.

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of fintech company Paytm, said that security is of paramount importance to Paytm considering its scope of financial services. To monitor the rapidly evolving public cloud infrastructure, Paytm used third-party tools. This would end up in resource delivery delays and impacting overall productivity. “Using GitHub Copilot, Paytm has launched ‘Code Armor’, a solution that revolutionizes the way we approach security and development,” said Sharma.

Sanjay Mohan, group chief technology officer at travel platform MakeMyTrip, said MakeMyTrip’s GitHub Copilot integration has resulted in significant productivity gains on several fronts. “Developers don’t get bored coding mundane things, freeing up time to solve higher-order problems, which is the core of our travel business,” Mohan said.

Mohammed Rafee Tarafdar, chief technology officer at technology company Infosys, said GitHub Copilot enables developers to increase productivity and efficiency and enables them to focus more on value-creating tasks. “Generative AI is transforming every aspect of the software lifecycle, and by leveraging the resources of Infosys Topaz, we are accelerating the adoption of generational AI for our customers,” Tarafdar said.

Open source innovation

GitHub also showed how open source communities in India are using GitHub Copilot to build digital solutions that help save lives. For example, Open Healthcare Network, a pioneering open source organization dedicated to improving the delivery and management of healthcare. Powered by a small team of dedicated developers, GitHub Copilot is accelerating the project’s development as it meets the needs of the country’s healthcare system. The project is currently being implemented in over 200 hospitals.

“This powerful tool of generative AI has dramatically increased our productivity in coding, documentation and testing,” said Srikanth Nadhamuni, founder and chief technology officer of Aadhaar and president of 10BedICU.