India is the fastest-growing market for GitHub, a Microsoft-owned software collaboration and innovation platform with 13.2 million developers using it. It is expected to overtake the US as the largest developer community on GitHub by 2027. India also has the second-highest number of generative AI projects on GitHub after the United States.
“GitHub continues to experience monumental growth in India,” said Sharryn Napier, VP of Asia Pacific region at the developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. “It’s exciting to see Indian developers making significant contributions to generative AI projects on GitHub, highlighting India’s growing significance in the AI landscape. The country’s developers are truly influencing the future of AI innovation worldwide. But that’s not all; we’re also witnessing strong adoption of GitHub’s AI-powered platform among Indian enterprises.
Last year, GitHub released its Octoverse report highlighting that generative AI is driving a significant and global spike in individual contributors to generative AI projects with 148% year-over-year growth. The US, India, and Japan are leading the way,” she told FE.
Growing influence
Globally, over 50,000 organisations are using GitHub Copilot, with 1.8 million paid subscribers, including many here in India. Infosys has embraced the GitHub Platform, including GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Advanced Security, and GitHub Copilot, to enable its developers to seamlessly collaborate and deliver secure innovation faster than ever. And Cognizant recently announced that 35,000 developers have been trained on GitHub Copilot, with an additional 40,000 developers slated to receive training. Multinationals like AT&T, Citigroup, and Honeywell all increased their overall GitHub usage after seeing productivity and code quality increases with Copilot.
Napier says, “Empowering India’s systems integrators with the power of AI and GitHub Copilot not only boosts local productivity but also has a global impact, enabling India to raise the bar for innovation across the world’s largest organisations”.
From idea to value
Dohmke said, “In the past two years, generative AI has foundationally changed the developer landscape largely as a tool embedded inside the developer environment. In 2022, we launched GitHub Copilot as an autocomplete pair programmer in the editor, boosting developer productivity by up to 55%. Copilot is now the most widely adopted AI developer tool. In 2023, we released GitHub Copilot Chat – unlocking the power of natural language in coding, debugging, and testing – allowing developers to converse with their code in real time.”
According to him, Copilot Workspace represents a radically new way of building software with natural language, and is expressly designed to deliver – not replace – developer creativity, faster and easier than ever before. “It will empower more experienced developers to operate as systems thinkers, and materially lower the barrier of entry to build software,” Dohmke said.
There are several ways Copilot Workspace can assist a developer throughout the software development journey. One of the most important benefits is its ability to help developers get started on a task. GitHub research has shown that getting started is often one of the most challenging parts of software development, particularly deciding how to approach a task, which files to look through, and how to consider the pros and cons of various solutions.
Copilot Workspace reduces that cognitive burden by meeting developers where a new task often begins – a GitHub issue – and synthesising all the information in that issue to inform a sequenced plan for developers to iterate through. From there, Copilot Workspace serves as an AI thought partner to help a developer implement the plan and make necessary edits throughout their entire codebase using natural language.
“Copilot Workspace is currently available in technical preview, and we can’t wait to see how developers everywhere, including those in India, start to use it,” Napier added.
GitHub is truly going all out to make coding a whole lot easier.