GitHub believes India will overtake the US as the largest developer community on the platform by 2027. To foster this ecosystem and assist developers across India and beyond, it has partnered with Indian IT firm Infosys and opened the first GitHub Center of Excellence at Infosys, Bengaluru.
This partnership represents a generational opportunity for Global Systems Integrators (GSIs) to spearhead advancements in the AI and software sectors.
“A new day has begun for the world’s GSIs. The Age of Copilot is here,” said GitHub chief Thomas Dohmke, who is in Bengaluru to attend GitHub Constellation 2024 scheduled for June 12. He added that by equipping their developers with GitHub Copilot and extending its capabilities to customers, GSIs can dramatically accelerate software production worldwide.
GitHub Constellation celebrates the best of the Indian developer community and provides a platform to connect on topics such as AI, collaboration, community, and security.
“GitHub is a very internal partner in what we are doing at Infosys. It brings tremendous value, letting developers focus on code, creating new features and functionalities, and innovating at the speed of thought,” said Naresh Choudhary, vice president and head of reuse and tools at Infosys.
“The GitHub advanced security features that we have been using, whether it is code scanning, secret scanning, or Dependabot, have all played a tremendous role in how we make code and deliver it to our customers as secure by design, built-in from Day 1 and not as an afterthought,” he explained.
We see generative AI play a critical role in all parts of the software development lifecycle; GitHub Copilot plays a crucial role in that. We have been on this Copilot journey for some time. We were early adopters, with 7,000 employees leveraging GitHub Copilot in the work that we do,” said DR Balakrishnan, EVP, service offering head, ECS, AI, and automation, Infosys.
GitHub x India
GitHub Copilot now allows users to code in Hindi as well. At Microsoft Build 2024, CEO Satya Nadella announced that developers can now program in their native languages, including Hindi.
“Think about it — every person can now start programming, whether it’s in Hindi, Brazilian, or Portuguese, and bring back the joy of coding in their native language,” said Nadella, emphasising that this would be available in the Copilot Workspace.
On his recent visit to the Microsoft India office, Dohmke said, “Together, GitHub and Microsoft will generate a groundswell of developers in India, building and deploying in natural language. India will rise in the age of AI—and we’re here to enable it.”
India currently has 13.2 million developers using GitHub, compared to approximately 20 million in the US. India also ranks second globally in the number of GenAI projects hosted on GitHub, following the US. The country hosts just under 30 million repositories.
In India, Axis Bank, HCLtech, and LTI Mindtree are some of the other customers of GitHub Copilot, apart from Infosys. Axis Bank was the first in the country to adopt Copilot for Microsoft 365 at enterprise scale with 300 users and has seen over 30% productivity gains in daily work.
Indian IT giant HCLTech developed a Copilot for Microsoft 365 plugin for Microsoft Teams to help software developers and managers streamline bug resolution. Meanwhile, LTIMindtree, an IT and consulting services company, created a Copilot for Microsoft 365 plugin for Teams to optimise staff management.
Dohmke recently posted a picture on X from his first visit to Bengaluru in 2008. “I love this country,” he wrote, adding that India is at the nexus of a monumental economic opportunity. “It is set to become the world’s largest developer community at the exact point in time when the age of AI (artificial intelligence) is taking off,” he said.
He further said that the next great AI startup will be as likely to come from Mumbai or Bengaluru as SF or Seattle. Ironically, last year, GitHub fired 85% of its Indian employees. Of the 216 employees, 183 were asked to leave, including the entire engineering team building GitHub.
Meanwhile, Indian developer Mufeed VH recently built something similar to GitHub Copilot—an open-source AI software engineer named Devika. It can understand human instructions, break them down into tasks, conduct research, and autonomously write code to achieve set objectives.
However, GitHub has been bullish on India to empower the developers in the country. As Dohmke sums it up, “The odds are ever in India’s favour to rise and win the age of AI.”
