There are now 19.2 million developers on GitHub in India, with around one million joining every three months. In the US, the user base on this Microsoft-owned developer platform stands at 25.8 million as it targets one billion developers by 2030. India is projected to become the company’s largest developer community globally; this could happen as soon as 2028. It is imperative that the billion users initiative needs to have a strong India connection.
\India’s AI developer surge and enterprise adoption of Copilot
“Enterprises, startups, and students are among the key drivers of this growth,” said Nahas Mohammed, director, Enterprise India, GitHub. “What makes this significant is not just the scale, but the nature of India’s contributions. Developers here are rapidly shaping the future of AI innovation, with contributions to public generative AI projects on GitHub surging 95% in recent months, cementing India as a hub of developer-driven AI activity,” he added.
Microsoft purchased GitHub, a widely-used platform for code repositories favoured by developers and major corporations, in a $7.5 billion stock transaction in 2018. Indian developers are increasingly leveraging tools like GitHub Copilot to build solutions, including open-source healthcare platforms. GitHub has also inked partnerships with major tech entities like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, so that developers can utilise models within comfortable workflows.
“Our goal is to empower every developer in India—from enterprise to open source, student to professional—with our AI powered platform, enabling them to code at the speed of thought and fuel the next wave of innovation in India and beyond,” said Mohammed. In his opinion, AI agents are a natural evolution of how developers work, and in India, the adoption curve is rising fast as agents become more integral to software development.
Developers using GitHub Copilot already report productivity gains of over 55%, and with AI agents, those gains are accelerating. Companies like Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant have been quick to embrace GitHub Copilot, supercharging their developer teams to solve tougher problems, deliver greater customer value, and build better products, faster. And to scale adoption further, Infosys and Wipro have set up centres of excellence with GitHub to scale adoption across teams. “The companies are creating a change in how software is developed, not only transforming engineering practices but also driving business value on a worldwide scale,” Mohammed said.
Lowering barriers and cultivating India’s AI-driven talent pool
Beyond strong enterprise adoption, India’s startups and scaleups are embracing AI agents to move faster and innovate boldly. Coding is no longer limited to those with formal engineering training. “With GitHub Copilot—and tools like GitHub Spark, which can turn ideas into full-stack apps entirely through natural language—we’re lowering barriers so everyone
(be that students or professionals in adjacent fields) can harness the power of AI in their work,” he said.
This opens the doors not only for software engineers but also for designers, analysts, and professionals across industries to bring their ideas to life without deep programming expertise—creating a citizen-developer culture within enterprises where anyone can build and solve problems.
Mohammed feels that India’s greatest strength is its talent pool and preparing this talent for the AI-driven future is an opportunity and a responsibility. The first step is to recognise coding as an essential skill. AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot are making this learning curve shorter and more accessible, allowing professionals to learn by doing, gain confidence quickly, and focus on problem-solving. Second, employees empowered with AI, integrating it deeply into their workflows, emerge with greater ambition, sharper technical fluency, and higher job satisfaction.
“Evidence shows that developers aren’t writing less code, they’re orchestrating more complex, system-level work. This offers a clear lesson for businesses everywhere: reimagining work with AI can unlock creative and innovative opportunities yet to be conceived,” Mohammed said. “For India, embracing AI will position the nation as a world-leading, industry-shaping talent hub,” he added.
