Gartner foresees AI’s to impact the role of Software Engineers

According to a recent study, Gartner says GenAI will require 80% of the engineering workforce to upskill through 2027. 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 AI into enterprise solutions at scale.

“Bold claims on the ability of AI have led to speculation that AI could reduce demand for human engineers or even supplant them entirely. While AI will transform the future role of software engineers, human expertise and creativity will always be essential to delivering complex, innovative software,” said Philip Walsh, Sr Principal Analyst at Gartner.

The analysts expect AI will impact the software engineering role in three ways. In the short term, AI will operate within boundaries, in the medium term, the emergence of AI agents will push boundaries. Last but not the least, In the long term, advances in AI will break boundaries and will mark the rise of AI engineering.

“In the AI-native era, software engineers will adopt an ‘AI-first’ mindset, where they primarily focus on steering AI agents toward the most relevant context and constraints for a given task. This will make natural-language prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) skills essential for software engineers,” said Walsh.

According to a Gartner survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2023 among 300 U.S. and U.K. organisations, 56% of software engineering leaders rated AI/machine learning (ML) engineer as the most in-demand role for 2024, and they rated applying AI/ML to applications as the biggest skills gap.