Strategic Insights To Accelerate Innovation

Faruk Muratovic, Deloitte Engineering leader and principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

In the coming years, generative AI (GenAI) is expected to revolutionize software product engineering. Because it presents a significant opportunity to enhance software development, drive digital transformation and accelerate innovation, I believe implementing GenAI in some form is becoming a strategic imperative.

It’s been my recent experience that a rapidly growing number of organizations are already using GenAI to augment their development process or are in the midst of piloting GenAI capabilities. Further, I’ve seen that most of those are increasing GenAI investments based on convincing measures of efficiency gains in the software development life cycle.

With the potential GenAI has already demonstrated, how will it—and how should it—be used for software engineering? While it’s too soon to predict how GenAI will be used in the long term, I’ve found that organizations are typically using it to support and accelerate software engineering processes, so that’s the lens I’ll be looking through in this article.

This article is the first in a two-part series on GenAI and software product engineering. In the next piece, I’ll discuss the challenges of implementing GenAI for software engineering and strategies to overcome them.

Generative AI Accelerates Software Development

In the context of software development, GenAI involves using large or small generative models to automatically create text, audio, code, images and 3D outputs that can assist developers with software product engineering. For example, GenAI can be used to create code snippets that accelerate the development process and improve code quality as well as to improve code review, documentation and standardization across software.

GenAI tools can also be prompted to generate user personas and test cases and summarize security reports—reducing the amount of time it takes a human to review these tasks. Leading organizations are beginning to use GenAI for a myriad of tasks related to software engineering, with coding co-pilots a powerful use case across all industries.

Generative AI Supports Better Tech And Business Alignment

GenAI can help align tech and business goals. GenAI-enabled tools can assist across the development life cycle, from design to user acceptance testing—not just the co-development of code. Since coding is a relatively small part of a developer’s workload, GenAI assistance can improve productivity and significantly compress the development process across the value chain.

These improvements can go a long way in bringing all stakeholders closer together in the software design and delivery process, fostering better alignment of technology efforts with key business objectives—which can help organizations innovate to thrive and grow in a complex, dynamic environment.

The Generative AI Advantage

Integrating GenAI with software product engineering can provide:

• Optimized Costs: Automating routine development tasks can increase efficiency and productivity in the coding process, enabling organizations to redirect more resources toward innovation and growth.

• Enhanced Security And Compliance: Improved detection of security vulnerability summarization can help humans more easily prioritize their review of information on breaches and compliance issues, which can limit both financial and reputational damage and maintain valuable customer trust.

• Market Differentiation Through Innovation: Leveraging AI can enable the development of unique features and products that can boost the innovation capabilities that drive competitive differentiation. On the product design side, 2D and 3D image generation can be a powerful tool for rapid prototype creation.

• Talent Retention And Attraction: Automating the mundane allows developers to focus on more value-added and creative work, which can increase job satisfaction and help attract and retain top talent.

• Scalability That Drives Agility: GenAI enables companies to rapidly scale development efforts to meet changing market demands without necessarily requiring the addition of resources, which can increase agility and responsiveness.

Generative AI’s Role: A Powerful Supplement To Human Capabilities

Although GenAI has the potential to reshape the software engineering process, organizations should continue to use it to assist human developers, not replace them.

Only humans carry the deep historical knowledge and lived experience of an organization’s legacy systems, enabling them to validate and customize user personas as well as contextually interpret complex business objectives to convert them into feasible technical requirements. GenAI can help human software developers ensure that software carries the lineage of the organization’s experiences and that outcomes are aligned with business and stakeholder needs.

Seizing The Generative AI Opportunity

GenAI presents an opportunity to enhance the software engineering process. Leveraging it can help you boost productivity while improving product quality, enhance security and compliance, and accelerate innovation—all while confirming alignment with your strategic goals. It’s important to embrace GenAI for software development but to do it strategically while centering the human element that ultimately drives your organization’s success. Doing so can position your organization to thrive now—and far into the future.

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