AI developer productivity could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion by 2030

New research released by Github details the potential economic impact and productivity benefits of generative AI.

GitHub, the world’s largest software development collaboration platform, has released new research detailing the potential economic impact and productivity benefits of generative AI.

GitHub conducted the research analyst firm Keystone.AI and Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti with the intention of exploring the immediate and long-term impact generative AI will have on developer productivity, the global economy and the open source ecosystem.

Overall, the research found that AI developer productivity benefits could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion by 2030.

GitHub Copilot has been activated by more than one million developers and adopted by over 20,000 organizations. It has generated over three billion accepted lines of code and can claim to be the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tool.

Analysis on a large sample of GitHub Copilot users (n = 934,533) reveals a sizable productivity impact. On average, within the first year in the market, users accept nearly 30% of code suggestions from GitHub Copilot and report increased productivity from these acceptances.

GitHub found that over time, the acceptance rate steadily increased as developers became more familiar with the tool.This suggests that GitHub Copilot has a large runway to continue its impact on developer productivity, as users become more accustomed to developing software with it.

The research says that using the 30% productivity enhancement, with a projected number of 45 million professional developers in 2030, generative AI developer tools could add productivity gains of an additional 15 million “effective developers” to worldwide capacity by 2030. This could boost global GDP by over $1.5 trillion, a boon in economic activity generated by this one group of workers.

GitHub is sure demand for software and developers will likely increase — as it has throughout the history of developer tools – and these productivity gains will continue to trigger an enormous impact, as developers seize new opportunities to utilize AI for solutions design and accelerate digital transformation worldwide.

GitHub’s own data shows that open source AI innovation is diverse and is being led by individuals.

Analyzing the top 20 account owners- based on stars on their

repositories related to generative AI on GitHub16 – nine belong to individuals and two belong to big tech.

A few others belong to smaller organizations or start-ups that are focused on democratizing AI research, making machine learning models more accessible to the public, providing tools to help deep

learning researchers and working on experimental projects.

Of the top 20 account owners by the number of forks on their repositories, 10 belong to individuals. Out of the rest, only two belong to big tech and the others belong to smaller organizations, start-ups or more than one person.

From this data, GitHub surmises that it is clear individuals are building with AI on GitHub the most.

The research reveals GPT language models are being integrated with user-facing tools, such as APIs, bots, assistants, mobile applications and plugins – leading to more software development.

This has led to a growth of new categories of skills such as prompt-engineering.

Open source alternatives to ChatGPT, such as Dolly, as well as other advancements in using ChatGPT, such as alternative web UIs for ChatGPT like ChatGPT Demo and Chatbot-UI have been built off the initial explosion of GPT and ChatGPT.

Thomas Dohmke, GitHub CEO, said: “The economic impact of generative AI over the next decade will be profound. We’re already seeing large-scale adoption of AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot by developers and companies. In a recent survey, 92% of developers said they use AI tools both in and outside of work, which underscores how quickly these tools are redefining the overall developer experience.

“What we draw from all this is that generative AI is turbocharging developer productivity with gains that will ultimately drive a boom in GDP for the global economy and, in turn, a surge in demand for software developers. We’ve seen this throughout the history of developer tool innovations from compilers to open source and we’re already seeing that again with GitHub Copilot and soon GitHub Copilot X. One year later, we’ve realized this collision of AI and the software developer will not lead to a decrease in developer jobs – it will lead to AI augmenting developer potential and accelerating human progress.”

GitHub’s study also found that less experienced developers have a greater advantage with tools like GitHub Copilot, which is corroborated by other studies, including GitHub’s previous experiments on the impact of AI on developer productivity.

The research says that as developers use these tools to upskill, they will become more fluent in prompting and interacting with AI to power the development lifecycle.

This, the research says, will ultimately help democratize software development for more people, help close the labor gap, and establish AI pair programming tools as part of the standard developer education experience.