Market research agency Gartner published on October 3, predicting that by 2027Generative AI will spawn new jobs in software engineering and operations and maintenance.80%engineerWill require skill upgrades.
Bold predictions of AI's potential have sparked speculation that AI could reduce the need for human engineers and evenoutright replaceThem. While AI will redefine the role of the software engineer, theHuman expertise and creativityremains the key to developing complex, innovative software."
IT Home learned from the report that AI will affect the work of software engineers in the following three stages.
Short term: AI will still be used to some extent
AI tools will be available throughEnhance the way existing developers work and their tasks, bringing some degree of productivity gains. Especially in organizations with mature engineering practices, senior developers will be significantly more productive.
Mid-term: AI Agent will break through existing ways of working
AI intelligences will change developers' work patterns, enabling developers to fully automate, marking the AI Native Software Engineering EraThe arrival of the At this stage, theMost of the codewill be generated by AI, not written by humans.
Walsh explains, "In the AI-native era, software engineers will adopt an 'AI-first' mindset, focusing more on how to get AI agents to understand and deal with the context and constraints of a given task." Natural language cue engineering and reinforcement generation (RAG) skills will become a must-have for developers.
Long term: advances in AI technology will break down more limitations and AI engineering will become mainstream
While AI will improve engineering efficiency, organizations will need toMore Skilled Software Engineersto meet the rapidly growing demand for AI-enabled software.
"Developing AI-driven applications will give rise to a new type of software professional -- the AI engineer. They have theSoftware Development, Data Science and AI / Machine Learningaspects of a comprehensive skill set that will become highly sought after."
According to a Gartner survey of 300 U.S. and U.K. organizations conducted in the fourth quarter of 2023, 56% of software engineering executives believe that AI / machine learning engineers are the 2024most pressing needtalent, the skills of AI / Machine Learning applied to real-world scenarios are also recognized as engineerBiggest shortcomings.
To support AI engineers, organizations need to invest more in AI development platforms, the report says.AI development platforms can help organizations build AI technologies more efficiently and apply them to enterprise solutions at scale. "This means organizations also need to provide skills training for data engineering and platform engineering teams on the tools and processes that support continuous AI integration and development."