Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI’s ChatGPT suggests the tech giant has its eye on Google and the lucrative “search” market, but there might be another strategy in play. By integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT into their modern application development environment, Microsoft could lure new and seasoned developers to Azure. Furthermore, a simplified development platform that uses chatbots could attract a new generation of non-IT industry-expert developers into their development community.
Loyal developer communities are crucial in the success of tech giants, such as Google, Microsoft, AWS, and Apple. AI-powered chatbots that help with development tasks could tempt loyal developer communities with simplified development processes and lower costs for innovating and delivering products. As tech giants gear up for battle with their latest AI innovations, a race to get developers could be on the horizon.
Traditional software development requires software developers, software engineers, and programmers to coordinate with an organization’s business experts. No-code low-code platforms simplify the development process by providing pre-built templates and a graphical user interphase, making it easier for non-technical citizen developers to create an application and participate in the development process.
However, No-code low-code platforms could just be the beginning of a software development evolution, providing us with a foundation and framework for a next generation zero-touch development technology that would combine chatbots, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation (RPA), a trifecta that could disrupt and revolutionize the development process.
AI-Powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT could provide Zero-Touch Development capabilities.
AI-powered chatbots, are rapidly evolving with capabilities that can discern the desired outcome or intent of a user. This means chatbots are getting better at understanding what a person really means, and not just what they say. As a result, a keyboard and mouse could soon be replaced by natural language processors (NLP) or “chatbots” to collect raw data from developers.
Raw data collected from developers could be interpreted by AI components and restructured into meaningful tasks with defined rules and a predicted outcome. Then unattended RPA software robots would be able to execute those tasks on a no-code low-code platform. RPA could also be used bridge limited no-code low-code platforms to sophisticated development applications and coding languages on the backend, expanding zero-touch development capabilities to handle even more complicated development tasks.
AI-Powered chatbots will enhance citizen development.
Initially, AI-Powered chatbots will likely provide citizen developers with answers to their questions, such as how to approach interface design and data management. However, citizen developers could soon provide high-level requirements for a task to an AI-powered chatbot, and RPA would perform the implementation of that task, which could include writing code.
Eventually, AI-powered chatbots will evolve to understand the desired outcome of non-technical citizen developers. When this happens, RPA could be used to build more complex applications that align to the developers’ objectives.
If citizen developers start building more complex applications, many organizations would likely rethink their development strategies, and shift more development tasks to their citizen developers and business experts in the business units.
AI-powered chatbots could impact the software developer role.
If citizen developers play a larger role in the innovation process, governance will be critical to avoid application sprawl and higher security risk. This could drive a change to the traditional IT software developer role to include more governance responsibility. Software developers would be needed to help organizations evaluate new ideas and demands. Furthermore, their knowledge of the different development methodologies, such as Agile, Waterfall, and DevOps, will continue to be critical for delivering high quality software to end users.
Although AI-powered chatbots with RPA could have a significant impact to the software developer role, new technology will unlikely replace traditional human software developers in the foreseeable future. The broad range of knowledge and skills that software developers have will continue to be critical for complex development projects that aim to create high-quality software.
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