Gartner, the research and advisory firm, said in its latest report that GenAI will spawn new roles in software engineering and operations through 2027, requiring 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill.
The report analyses the impact of AI engineering on the daily functioning of software development organisations and notes that it significantly increases productivity by performing smaller tasks and helping senior developers in big organisations.
Philip Walsh, senior principal analyst at the research firm, elaborated on the need for human intervention in the development of complex software.
Looking further, AI could automate more tasks, thus changing the working environment for current developers. Most of the mid-level coding would be done by AI, and humans would need to be prompt in senior-level engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This technique combines the strengths of information retrieval and natural language generation (NLG).
Looking at the long-term effect, AI will majorly integrate into the software industry, and AI engineering will play a pivotal role. “The AI engineer possesses a unique combination of skills in software engineering, data science and AI/machine learning (ML), skills that are sought after,” says Walsh.
Need for Human Intervention
AIM reported earlier that the job market for software engineers has been highly affected by tools like Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude. Though generative AI tools have contributed to completely transforming the process followed by software engineers, human creativity and innovative expertise remain essential in providing necessary and original inputs.
Zahiruddin Tavargere, the senior principal software engineer who started exploring AI Engineering in early 2023, expressed, “Today I can use data engineering techniques, build ML models, leverage GenAI, and use MLOps techniques to solve business problems and push the solutions to production.”
What do the Developers Think?
A user on Reddit who runs an AI engineering consultancy expressed that if he interviewed someone who demonstrated a few AI products where they could clearly think about the product and not just engineering, he’d hire them quickly.
Though this point of view holds much water, developers still argue about the actual definition of upskilling and how much it contributes in reality. Another Reddit user, however, doubted that developers will need new skills. “Working with AI-generated code is essentially maintenance coding, which is taking someone else’s codebase and fixing it,” the person commented in a Reddit post.
As AI Engineering becomes more common, companies will have to adopt more AI-friendly developer platforms, which will, in turn, help these organisations integrate AI more effectively on a large scale.
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