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Google is tracking how AI is making its engineers more productive — and has developed a specific way to measure it.
Speaking on an episode of the “Lex Fridman Podcast” that aired last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company was looking closely at how artificial intelligence was boosting productivity among its software developers.
“The most important metric, and we carefully measure it, is how much has our engineering velocity increased as a company due to AI?” he said. The company estimates that it’s so far seen a 10% boost, Pichai said.
A Google spokesperson clarified to Business Insider that the company tracks this by measuring the increase in engineering capacity created, in hours per week, from the use of AI-powered tools.
Put simply, it’s a measurement of how much extra time engineers are getting back thanks to AI.
Whether Google expects that 10% number to keep increasing, Pichai didn’t say. However, he said he expects agentic capabilities — where AI can take actions and make decisions more autonomously — will unlock the “next big wave”.
Google has its own internal tools to help engineers code. Last year, the company launched an internal coding copilot named “Goose,” trained on 25 years of Google’s technical history, Business Insider previously reported.
While AI Pichai said during the podcast that Google plans to hire more engineers next year. “The opportunity space of what we can do is expanding too,” he said, adding that he hopes AI removes some of the grunt work and frees up time for more enjoyable aspects of engineering.
Separately, the company is tracking the amount of code that is being generated by AI within Google’s walls — a number that is apparently increasing.
Pichai said during Alphabet’s most recent earnings call that more than 30% of the company’s new code is generated by AI, up from an estimated 25% in October.
Google isn’t the only one. Speaking at London Tech Week on Monday, Microsoft UK CEO Darren Hardman said its GitHub Copilot coding assistant is now writing 40% of code at the company, “enabling us to launch more products in the last 12 months than we did in the previous three years.”
He added: “It isn’t just about speed.”
In April, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted AI could handle half of Meta’s developer work within a year.
Additional reporting by Effie Webb.
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