A Microsoft manager explains how artificial intelligence has changed his job

• A 37-year-old Microsoft manager says artificial intelligence has changed his workflow.
• He says AI has reduced his time spent coding by 70%, as well as his time spent reading and in meetings.
• But given the rush to scale AI, he also says the time saved goes toward meeting deadlines and shipping updates faster.

This essay, as said, was based on a conversation with a 37-year-old man Naga Santhosh Reddy Vootukurisenior manager software engineer at Microsoft, which invests heavily in artificial intelligence. This essay has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider verified his identity, employment and rates.

When ChatGPT launched in November 2022, the whole world was shocked. As a programmer, I really enjoyed it.

I have been working at Microsoft for almost 14 years and have been a manager for over a decade. Before ChatGPT came along, I’d say 80% of my daily work was coding and 20% was reviewing documentation, writing, brainstorming with my team, and helping junior engineers with various tasks.

Thanks to the OpenAI and Microsoft partnership, we have all the tools we need directly from OpenAI and it is tightly integrated with Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Visual Studio, which is the basis of what developers use to write code in various languages.

This is how artificial intelligence changed my job.

This reduced the time spent coding by 70%

As a programmer, AI has greatly improved my efficiency and accuracy.

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As a manager, it’s my responsibility to review my team’s code and make sure it’s 100% quality up to date so I can connect it to main production before we release and deploy it.

I used to have to manually check every line change. But I would say that 70% of my time was reduced by integrating with AI. The AI ​​tool integrates my previous comment history to give me comments and suggestions on the code.

Artificial intelligence also saves me time in meetings. It used to be very difficult for me. I used to accept most meetings, but then tell people that unless questions were directed to me directly, I couldn’t participate. I would ask them to record the meeting and share it with me so I could review it later.

But thanks to AI, I get an automatic record of a summary of what was discussed. It also provides a breakdown of the tasks or activities I need to do.

None of the tools are 100% accurate, but I would say they are completely accurate 95% to 96% of the time and are constantly improving.

AI also saves me time on reading. If the group releases a new feature, I need to review every design document and provide as much feedback as possible. There may be 10 to 15 long design documents containing all the minute details.

When Copilot is integrated with Word, a ribbon appears at the top of my documents where I get a full summary. I no longer have to spend X amount of hours reading the entire document. You can also use a similar tool in email if you’ve been added to a large email thread and don’t have context.

I still have a full-time job

While AI has definitely helped bypass mundane tasks, that’s not what my team focuses on. Regardless, when I come back from using AI, I use it for other work.

In my role, I talk to a lot of customers about released products, and they always come back and ask for more features. Then I have to sit down with my team and come up with a release strategy. AI cannot be used in such situations. Once developers start writing code for these projects and do the actual work, we will leverage AI.

At Microsoft, we follow a management framework called the Scrum model, which means we release solutions in sprints. Every two weeks we aim to complete certain pieces of work and we strive to complete them. Previously, it could take Microsoft two or three years to deliver major releases. However, in the current model, teams publish updates monthly, and sometimes even weekly.

We live in a competitive world. If Google releases something, Microsoft has to counter it with another cool feature. That’s why developers use AI wherever they can to reduce their time, but they use any time they save on other tasks or other functions.

If you work for a product-based software company, even if you gain time, you can’t just sit back and relax.