BENGALURU: India will overtake the United States as the largest software developer community by 2027, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said on Tuesday. Dohmke was addressing technology leaders at GitHub Galaxy Bengaluru.
Speaking to The New Indian Express, he said though the age of AI has begun, it will not replace coders. When asked what is the right age for a student to learn coding, he said six or seven years.
In India, Microsoft-owned GitHub continues to see adoption of its Copilot-powered developer platform by companies in every industry, including Cognizant, MakeMyTrip and Paytm.
In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. There are over 15.4 million developers in India building on GitHub, growing 33% y-o-y.
“India will not just be a global leader, but the global leader in the age of AI. Creativity in Indian open source will flourish, with a spring of AI innovations and startups blooming. And Indian businesses will carve a competitive advantage in the global market, as their developers build software with an accelerated speed of code,” Dohmke added.
Developers are already 55% faster when using Copilot. India is on the brink of a great convergence between the world’s largest population of developers and the newfound possibility of AI. If enabled, this great convergence will generate a consequential economic boom in India that could be felt around the world for generations to come, he added.
GitHub has also partnered with IT services company Infosys to launch the Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru.
Mohammed Rafee Tarafdar, CTO at Infosys, said, “GitHub Copilot is empowering our developers to become more productive, efficient, and enabling them to focus more on value creating tasks. Generative AI is transforming every aspect of the software development lifecycle, and using Infosys Topaz assets, we are accelerating Gen AI adoption for our clients."