GitHub community in India is going to overtake the US: Sharryn Napier

Napier spoke about developers and their significance in AI development globally

GitHub, the coding website owned by Microsoft, has 13.2 million users in India after 4 million new ones joined it last year in the country. India will by 2027 overtake the United States (US) in terms of total developer population on the platform. Indian developers are also leading users of the platform’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) features. SHARRYN NAPIER, vice-president for Asia Pacific (APAC) at GitHub, says the platform is committed to investing in India. Napier, in a video interview with Shivani Shinde, spoke about developers and their significance in AI development globally. Edited excerpts:

You took over the GitHub APAC role slightly over two years ago. How has the journey for you and GitHub been? What will be your focus this year?

The AI concept was not even mainstream, but the last 12 months have been a different story. We have seen several enterprises/organisations embracing GitHub Copilot (a code completion tool). We see people going ahead using this in a more meaningful way. Lot of customers are talking about the benefits of GitHub Copilot.

We are the leading AI platform and we want to bring that power to enterprises, to smaller teams and individual developers. AI is the best tool to empower the next generation of developers.

What is the significance of Indian developers on the platform?

I look at India from three lenses…the open source (OS) community in India – it is growing the fastest than any other OS community in the world. It is going to overtake the US, and could be even earlier than 2027. We have 4 million developers in India. The contribution of India developers to OS and particularly AI projects on the GitHub platform is also growing fast. That will also overdo the US as well.

The open source community and growth of developers offer opportunities to take these capabilities globally.

The other element of the developer ecosystem is the system integrators (SI) in India. I believe they are going to be providing large organisations globally the capability at scale to be able to deliver faster, more secure, and more productive software so that they can actually, from a business perspective, deliver faster for their organisations. I think that that is a bit of an amplification of the value that the Indian SI is actually bringing to those for large global organisations.

What investments has GitHub done in India and are these going to grow?

We've been very successful in India. 

If you look at India being the second largest ecosystem, it is going to soon be the largest globally. It shows the investment that we’re making in that space both from when people are very young in their university days and all the way through to when they’re in enterprise. I think that that investment is very obvious because of the size of the community, but the growth of it as well.

We are bringing Galaxy, our flagship event, to India. 

Our CEO (chief executive officer) is travelling to India. We have a massive community in India and we will have Constellation, an in-person developer conference celebrating the best of the Indian developer community this year. This is a good indicator of our interest and investments in India.

There is a fear that Copilot may take away the significance of coders. What are you seeing with AI being infused across GitHub?

Whenever there has been a new technology the first position or question that gets asked is how will it impact jobs. AI is not different. What we're actually seeing is developers being happier. This might sound quite simple but when a developer is happy, and they're doing coding that they feel is meaningful, they actually become more creative. They are more productive. I do not think that businesses are looking to reduce new products, or they're not going to want less out of IT (information technology) or the developers. They're actually wanting more.

Developers are going to become much more creative because they're not doing mundane tasks. That would normally go into developing earlier. If you look at the GitHub, AI empowered platform, developers are able to use AI through the whole life cycle of building code.

Indian developers are rising on GitHub, but are they able to monetise as well?

Infosys (an Indian IT services company) is a good example. They do a lot of domestic and international development for customers. They are employing GitHub Copilot to speed up development for customers. The willingness to deploy at scale magnifies the organisation globally.

Right now what we are seeing is that organisations like Infosys are seeing their core competence improving. As almost 60 per cent of code is being written by Copilot and that optimises the pace of development. There are many SIs that are adopting GitHub Co-pilot in a big way.

What challenges do you see in adoption of AI among organisations?

In general, there is a hurdle when you say AI. The way ChatGPT has impacted and how it’s getting embraced now everyone wants it. But a lot of customers have to get through the security and legal issues. The SIs also need to educate their customers. This is a complicated journey.

We are also seeing that organisations that were on the edge and unable to decide now want to adopt as they do not want to be left behind. The challenge that we saw over the last 12 months was the discovery and organisations getting comfortable. Now, it will be executed at scale.

Do you see regulations being a hurdle for adopting AI?

We are seeing a lot of countries looking at regulating AI in their own way. Countries that are not embracing AI and not being thinking forward then those economies will be limited and will be left behind. Everyone has their journey’s to work on. This is still evolving. For GitHub, as we go through the next 12-18 months we will overcome some of the concerns as the platform also matures.