There a lot speculation about the impact of artificial intelligence on the workplace. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman doesn’t doubt that the arrival of AI in companies will be a game-changer for certain professions. Meanwhile, Avital Balwit, chief of staff to the CEO at Anthropic, says AI will take her job in about three years.
Business Insider obtained internal recordings from June which show that Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman was convinced that the advent of AI would transform the role of software engineers because companies would no longer need people to write code.
The transformation of the software developer. According to Garman, the future of coding is evolving. With the rise of artificial intelligence, software engineers will need to acquire new skills beyond coding.
In an internal talk, Garman explained that developers may stop coding soon because AI will take over many of those tasks. “If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time—I can’t exactly predict where it is—it’s possible that most developers are not coding,” he claimed.
Changing the nature of work. The Amazon cloud boss explained that while coding will continue to be a way of communicating with computers, the role of software engineers will transform into one with a more creative and innovative connotation. “Coding is just kind of like the language that we [use to] talk to computers. It’s not necessarily the skill in and of itself. The skill in itself is, 'how do I innovate? How do I build something that’s interesting to my end users?'” Garman said in the recordings obtained by the media outlet.
“It just means that each of us needs to better understand what our customers need and what the end result of our work is because that will increasingly require focusing on the work as opposed to sitting down and writing code,” he predicted.
He’s not the only one who thinks so. Garman’s speech isn’t new. A few months ago, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, one of the leading players in the development of AI, expressed the same idea at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
Huang said young people starting their careers today shouldn’t focus on learning to code because “It is our job to create computing technology that nobody has to program. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of AI. For the very first time, the technology divide has been completely closed. To engage with AI is a lot easier now than at any time in the history of computing.” In Huang’s opinion, future engineers should start thinking about how to use this technology, not about programming tools. AI will take care of that.
AI’s impact on employment. While it’s true that AI raises some uncertainties about the future of some jobs, Garman’s recorded comments didn’t present a pessimistic view of that future.
Instead of warning of the extinction of developers, he suggested that AI will open up new creative opportunities in the field. “Being a developer in 2025 may be different from being a developer in 2020,” Garman added. The executive noted that this is one of the reasons AWS helps its employees “continue to improve their skills and learn about new technologies.”
A fresh approach to innovative work. AWS spokeswoman Aisha Johnson confirmed that Garman’s comments highlight the opportunities AI will offer developers to focus more on creative work.
“Matt articulated a vision for how AWS will continue to remove undifferentiated heavy lifting from the developer experience so that builders can focus more of their skill and energy on the most innovative work,” Johnson said in a statement sent to Business Insider.
Integrating AI into the workflow. According to Business Insider, the executive encouraged employees to find new ways to incorporate AI into their workflow to improve it. “A lot of times we think about customers, which is great, but I would also encourage everyone internally to think about how you can completely change what you’re doing,” Garman said.
The CEO cited the example of Smartsheet, a company that incorporated the AI capabilities of Amazon’s Q chatbot into a Slack channel that allows employees to ask questions about internal policies and documentation.
This article was written by Rubén Andrés and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.
Image | Unsplash (AltumCode), AWS
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