AI is powering enterprise development, GitHub says

AI is becoming increasingly important in enterprise software development, particularly with the rise of accompanying agentic models, GitHub’s Martin Woodward, vice president of developer relations, said during his talk at this week’s GitHub Galaxy online conference. He also said devops was a critical factor in AI usage.

In a presentation on software development and AI, titled “The AI-Accelerated Enterprise,” Woodward stressed that AI tools are being adopted in different ways. “AI has been and can be used across your entire application pipeline to kind of accelerate teams,” Woodward said. “But what we’re seeing is that the teams who are best placed with mature devops practices, they’re currently the ones who are best-positioned to take advantage of the power of AI, having processes and technology and guardrails in place to help you ship more quickly.”  

Referring to GitHub Copilot, Woodward noted that AI-powered programming tools are moving beyond autocomplete capabilities that help developers more quickly iterate through their code into the next phase of AI coding assistance. “We’re seeing the rise of agentic-based methods in software development and we’re also seeing AI-native ways of building software,” he said. Developers using Visual Studio Code on GitHub now have a huge range of models available to them, Woodward said.

Devops also is being refined based on agentic patterns, Woodward said. He presented a slide decreeing, “Teams will get better at devops with agents,” with the slide noting that agents help developers with tasks such as fixing bugs, targeted refactoring, doing code reviews, and performing dependency upgrades. Also presented by Woodward was a slide describing the software of the future, noting that future applications will be cloud-native, centered on customer experience, and intelligent, with AI being built into customer experiences.

Leading companies already are focused on customer experience, Woodward said.