Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in Software Development

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers diverse applications in software development that will drastically change how firms develop software. It can:

• Support developers by accelerating coding tasks, leading to faster and higher-quality code.
• Document existing codes that have no documentation.
• Help developers to appropriate codes that are not theirs.
• Debug codes.
• Accelerate or even automate the migration of legacy stacks to more modern technologies.

Within the next 6 to 18 months, most software development tools will integrate some artificial intelligence to support developers. On the one hand, there are traditional players like Microsoft with its Copilot. But competition is building up with solutions from Tabnine, Codeium, and CodeComplete, to name a few. And you can expect all products for data science like Databricks, Hex, and data iku to integrate some “copilot” to support users and developers.

There are big questions on the intellectual property of the code generated by artificial intelligence, and the code firms share with these solutions. Everybody knows the horror story of Samsung using ChatGPT to debug some proprietary and confidential code. ChatGPT eagerly consumed the data, using it as training material for future public responses.

The rise of artificial intelligence will not render developers obsolete. Instead, it offers a unique chance to establish a harmonious collaboration between humans and computers. Developers should see Artificial Intelligence as a new colleague with superpowers. By delegating repetitive and mundane tasks to AI, developers can devote more time to creative problem-solving and embark on a journey of enhanced productivity and innovation.

Another interesting topic, not linked to artificial intelligence, is how financial institutions recruit and deploy developers. The traditional way has been to hire and locate them in internal facilities. But the war for talent has made it very difficult to hire outstanding developers, not to mention that they often don’t want to be employees or don’t want to be in a specific location. They want more freedom. An ecosystem of secure software development solutions is becoming available in the public cloud and from specialized providers like StrongNewtork (www.strong.network)— time for financial institutions to start looking into this.