“And then, you know, when you look at at the average individual’s job, [they’re] using generative AI now to help…write content. They’ve embraced a product in our marketing department called Writer, which also happens to be a ventures investment of ours, as well. And it’s really become kind of a de facto standard to help people write a first draft of content, and help them actually write better.
“When you dive in on software engineering, I would say that true software engineers, coders, and developers are among the most impacted or positively impacted by general AI and how they do their work every day.
“Depending upon how you count the numbers, we have somewhere in the 150,000-to-200,000 range of software engineers. That group uses [Copilot] in a lot of different ways today. Of course, we also have our own internal tools that we use, which are now fully embedded with generative AI. I have a client project team, for example, it has 1,600 people on it that are all using generative AI every day and…they actually deliver their projects as well.”
What are your software engineers using generative AI for primarily? “It’s interesting. It’s beyond the software development. There’s a lot the things that make people nervous about the software development piece itself and the coding. [AI] is good for inspiration, but you’re going to want to check exactly what’s generated really, really well.
“On the other hand, the other pieces of software engineering, which quite frankly this is a very much a pareto principle thing, like 80% of the work that you do has nothing to do with writing the code.
“I would tell you that our software engineers — and I’ve seen some of the data, too — say the code that they actually get out of Copilot and other [genAI tools] is 70% to 80% usable — in some cases, even higher. And, they check it very thoroughly before they use it. This is primarily, I would say, more on internal projects than it is for clients. But they tell us that they’re 40% to 50% more productive with generative AI in the things that they do.”
