As much as 80 per cent of the software engineers will need to upskill themselves by 2027 to keep up with the growing demands of artificial intelligence, consultancy firm Gartner has predicted.
In the short term, AI tools may create modest increases in productivity complementing the developers' existing skills, however, in the long term, when AI will have replaced most code there will be a pressing need for the workforce to skill them in the new order of languages.
"In the AI-native era, software engineers will adopt an ‘AI-first’ mindset, where they primarily focus on steering AI agents toward the most relevant context and constraints for a given task," Senior Principal Analyst Philip Walsh said.
This will make natural-language prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) skills essential for software engineers, Gartner said.
Walsh predicted that the AI engineer, as will be needed in future, will possess a "unique combination" of software engineering, data science and AI/machine learning skills.
The firm said that fears that AI will replace all human labour are overstated, and there will always be the need for skilled professionals.
"Human expertise and creativity will always be essential to delivering complex, innovative software," Walsh said.
Earlier this year, research from AWS revealed that some employers were willing to pay a 31 per cent premium on salaries for tech workers with AI skills.
According to a Gartner survey conducted in the fourth quarter of 2023, among 300 US and UK companies, 56 per cent of software engineering leaders rated AI/machine learning engineer as the most in-demand role for 2024, and they rated applying AI/ML to applications as the biggest skills gap.
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