There’s been a lot of attention on employing generative AI to create or modify software code. Now it’s time to look at how AI can assist IT professionals and managers in other ways.
Will artificial intelligence (AI) help move DevOps efforts from fragile to agile? There is speculation across the industry that AI can greatly accelerate not just code generation for software, but all the details that follow — including specifications, documentation, testing, deployment, and more.
AI has been used for several years in its operational and predictive form, working behind the scenes to automate workflows and scheduling. Now, IT managers and professionals are embracing the potential of generative AI.
Within the next three years, the number of platform-engineering teams employing AI to augment the software development lifecycle will likely increase from 5% to 40%, according to an analysis published by a team of Gartner analysts led by Manjunath Bhat.
Across the IT industry, there is notable optimism about the potential boost AI provides to DevOps and associated Agile practices. «Combining the DevOps and AI domains can be complementary by enhancing all phases of the software development lifecycle and enabling software to ship to market more rapidly, reliably, and efficiently,» Billy Dickerson, principal software engineer with SAS, told ZDNet.
Much activity is taking place around generative AI and the DevOps process. Just about all (97%) of the 408 technology managers in a survey released by automation specialist Stonebranch indicated they are «interested in incorporating generative AI into their automation programs.» These professionals «see genAI as a pivotal tool to connect a more diverse set of tools and empower a broader range of users,» the survey’s authors point out.
AI boosts DevOps, but DevOps also boosts AI application development, the Stonebranch survey shows. At least 72% of respondents have embraced machine-learning pipelines to power their generative AI initiatives.
While there has been a lot of attention on using generative AI to create or modify software code, this is only a fraction of the development process. It’s time to look at how AI can assist IT professionals and managers in other ways.
«Developers on average spend anywhere between 10% and 25% of their time writing code,» Gartner’s Bhat and his co-authors wrote.
