IBM Software sees 30-40% increase in developer productivity using GenAI | Company News

One of the tasks of Dinesh Nirmala, head of IBM Software, is to integrate generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) into all products created by IBM and use it to increase the productivity of developers in labs around the world.

Nirmal believes that one of the biggest benefits of GenAI is automation, leading to optimization and increased productivity. He shares that IBM Software has seen productivity increases of 30-40 percent in some segments of software development.

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“Software development involves many aspects beyond code generation. In areas like code documentation, explanations or test case generation, we see a 30-40 per cent increase in optimisation and productivity,” he told Business Standard at a virtual event.

Nirmal says IBM Software Labs is integrating GenAI into every product in IBM’s portfolio, giving developers the ability to write code.

“Developers can now write hundreds and thousands of lines of code that they couldn’t write last year. It’s a developer productivity tool, enabling faster code delivery and application development. For me, it’s about productivity and augmenting human capabilities, not replacing them,” he said when asked about concerns about GenAI replacing developers.

IBM Software Labs in India are located in Ahmedabad, Kochi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune.

Nirmal illustrates how GenAI is being introduced to IBM’s India labs. “Our Kochi Labs focus on automation products like watsonx Orchestrate. Ahmedabad focuses on integrating GenAI with our security products,” he added.

He also notes that a high percentage of developers in IBM Software India labs are proficient in GenAI. “That’s why we’ve brought a lot more entry-level missions to India.”

Despite the hype surrounding GenAI, Nirmal says actual adoption and implementation of the technology has been limited.

“When you talk about GenAI adoption — not just proof of concept, but actual deployment in production environments — less than 10 percent of enterprises have fully adopted it,” he said.

The reason is simple. I attribute this to enterprises having other concerns that are more important than adopting GenAI for end-user applications like ChatGPT.

“Although the technology cycle is moving fast, it will take some time for GenAI to be implemented in enterprises; that is the reality. This is because there are many models that also need to be validated. If I go to Hugging Face, there are 6,000 models available. As an enterprise, how I choose any one of them is a complex issue,” he said.

IBM recently launched the GenAI Innovation Centre in Kochi, aimed at enabling enterprises, startups and partners to explore, test and build generative AI technology.

As organizations move from experimenting with AI to implementing it to achieve business value, they often find that AI projects are too complex to integrate due to limited skills or expertise.

The GenAI Innovation Center will provide organizations with access to IBM experts and technologies designed to help them build, scale and accelerate the deployment of enterprise-grade AI.