OpenAI to introduce AI agents that can do jobs of engineers: Sam Altman

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said the company is rolling out AI agents capable of performing many jobs currently done by junior engineers across organisations, raising fresh concerns about the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on the workforce. The announcement has significant implications for India and the Indian IT services sector, which hires thousands of engineers every year.

 

Executives across technology and IT services firms have said that the nature of jobs will change as GenAI adoption becomes more mainstream and writing code becomes automated. Still, they believe that human intervention will be needed to oversee AI models and that it will help employees become more productive.

 

"Let’s imagine the case of a software engineering agent, which is an agent that we expect to be particularly important. Imagine that this agent will eventually be capable of doing most things a software engineer at a top company with a few years of experience could do, for tasks up to a couple of days long. It will not have the biggest new ideas, it will require lots of human supervision and direction, and it will be great at some things but surprisingly bad at others," Altman said in his blog.

 

The comments from the maker of ChatGPT suggest that companies may not actually need as many junior engineers as before, as several roles get automated. Most Indian IT firms have seen a drop in headcount over the last few quarters. While the main reason has been a tepid demand environment due to volatile macroeconomic conditions, automation is also believed to be gradually reducing the need to hire at the pace practised earlier.

 

For example, Cognizant—which used Google's Gemini tool for developers—said last week that 20 per cent of its code was written by AI.

 

"A decent share of revenue for Indian IT comes from low- to medium-complexity coding, so there is a potential threat from GenAI, which looks set to automate (or assist) part of this work. Our estimates show that 20-25 per cent of IT services work may see 20-30 per cent deflation, which means a potential 4-5 per cent fall in overall IT services spending over the next three to four years," HSBC wrote in a note in December.

 

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, partner at tech growth advisory firm Catalincs, said he expects a progressive adoption of agentic AI, and the pace of adoption will depend on the tech maturity of the industry. "Students will need to be trained in higher skill sets that require them to work side by side with agents. But for that, we need to reimagine the STEM curriculum and syllabi."