Our recent piece on the generative AI opportunity highlighted a report by McKinsey that identified a handful of functions that encompass around 75% of generative AI’s disruptive potential. Among those was software engineering for corporate IT and product development which represents a potential $899 billion “productivity uplift.” For example, one study by Cornell showed that developers paired with Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot tool could complete a task 55% quicker. Common sentiment seems to be that AI-powered coding tools are putting inexperienced programmers on par with their experienced counterparts.
Trying to estimate the potential opportunity here is difficult. McKinsey tells us GitHub Copilot is used by more than 20 million coders which would represent a fifth of the 100 million developers that GitHub claims are using their platform. Just because a feature is made available to developers doesn’t mean they’ll use it, but the takeaway is crystal clear. The future is in AI-assisted programming, so how can we invest in the tools that tomorrow’s developers will use to create computer code more efficiently?
Revisiting Gitlab Stock
Unless you’re an IT professional it may be easy to confuse GitHub with GitLab (GTLB). The former is owned by the evil empire, Microsoft, while the latter is a publicly traded stock that offers investors pure play exposure to a category of software engineering more broadly referred to as “DevOps” (stands for Development Operations.) The last time we looked at Gitlab was back in 2021 in a piece titled,