Gen AI Will Require 80% Of Software Engineers To Upskill Through 2027: Gartner

There have been speculations that artificial intelligence could reduce demand for human engineers or even supplant them entirely. However, while AI will transform the future role of software engineers, human expertise and creativity will always be essential to delivering complex, innovative software.

Generative AI will spawn new roles in software engineering and operations, requiring 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill through 2027, according to research and consulting firm Gartner Inc.

Gartner analysts anticipate that AI will influence the software engineering role in three distinct ways:

AI Will Operate Within Boundaries In Short Term: AI tools will generate modest productivity increases by augmenting existing developer work patterns and tasks. The productivity benefits of AI will be most significant for senior developers in organisations with mature engineering practices.

Emergence of AI Agents Will Push Boundaries In Medium Term: AI agents will transform developer work patterns by enabling developers to fully automate and offload more tasks. This will mark the emergence of AI-native software engineering when most code will be AI-generated rather than human-authored.

In the AI-native era, software engineers will adopt an AI-first mindset, where they primarily focus on steering AI agents towards the most relevant context and constraints for a given task. This will make natural-language prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation skills essential for software engineers, Gartner analysts said.

Rise Of AI Engineering In Long Term: While AI is expected to make engineering more efficient, organisations will need even more skilled software engineers to meet the rapidly increasing demand for AI-empowered software. These engineers will need to possess a unique combination of skills in software engineering, data science, and AI/machine learning.

To support AI engineers, organisations will need to invest in AI developer platforms. AI developer platforms will help organisations build AI capabilities more efficiently and integrate the technology into enterprise solutions at scale. This investment will require organisations to upskill data engineering and platform engineering teams to adopt tools and processes that drive integration and development for AI artefacts, Gartner said.