GitHub Enterprise Copilot promises to bring back the “joy of coding", according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
In a launch event for the roll-out of the new enterprise tier, Nadella said a raft of improvements to the AI coding assistant will provide developers with more personalized insights and "deeper context" of internal codebases.
The new premium tier will process an organization's proprietary code and provide developers with recommendations and quick summaries of any changes to the codebase, the company confirmed.
GitHub Copilot Enterprise will provide added functionality to the firm’s existing pair programming assistant. The AI-powered tool can be placed within a company’s integrated development environment (IDE) and offer developers inline code completion capabilities.
The move follows extensive research into the productivity improvements delivered by the GitHub Copilot tool. Analysis from the firm shows the AI assistant offered a 55% speed boost for developers and has unlocked significant benefits to overall productivity.
The introduction of this new enterprise tier is aimed at helping developers with other aspects of their workload, according to GitHub.
As part of the expansion, the AI assistant will connect Copilot Chat to an organization’s GitHub repositories. The firm said this will help developers gain a holistic understanding of different elements of their codebase and streamline more “mundane tasks across the developer lifecycle”.
Among these features are documentation search and summaries as well as code review capabilities.
This will enable developers to identify bugs and suggest fixes based on natural language inputs. The new features will also provide more detailed insights based on an organization’s proprietary codebase through instant access to a chatbot.
The enterprise tier will also offer ‘smart actions’ to help ensure developers are up-to-date on the latest changes in a repository by generating summaries of pull requests.
During his keynote at GitHub Universe, CEO Thomas Dohmke said the new features will not only help developers write code faster, but “keep the flow state and serve from idea, to code, to deployment while maintaining security, compliance, and quality”.
GitHub Copilot Enterprise will be rolled out to general availability in February 2024 and businesses can join a waiting list today.
A brewing battle of AI coding assistants
Microsoft will hope this new premium tier could unlock further revenue gains in their Intelligent Cloud segment, with heavy investment in artificial intelligence (AI) being central to this strategy.
The announcement of GitHub Copilot Enterprise follows AWS’ recent roll-out of an enterprise tier on its own pair programming assistant, CodeWhisperer.
The CodeWhisperer Enterprise Tier connects to a company’s private repository, which the AI can learn and provide developers with contextual insights and useful summaries.
Like GitHub’s offering, Amazon’s AI coding companion gives users the ability to customize the assistant’s suggestions using their organization’s proprietary codebase. This enables developers to work with unfamiliar APIs without having to spend hours building their understanding of the system.
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A preview of the customization features for CodeWhisperer is available with the Enterprise tier, which became generally available in April 2023.
A number of other coding assistants capable of optimizing developer workflows with features such as inline code completion are also hitting the market, reflecting the community’s appetite for these enhancements.
Google’s DuetAI is one notable competitor that will also offer enterprise-focused customization features in the future, according to a blog post in May 2023.
Startups are also entering the AI coding space, with tools such as Divi AI, Replit, Sourcegraph Cody, and Tabnine, all offering developers features such as code generation, code reviews, and inline code completion.
