Big Tech companies aren’t just building AI — they’re increasingly using it to write more of their code.
Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, said Tuesday that between 20% and 30% of the code for some of the company’s projects is written by AI.
Speaking to Mark Zuckerberg at Meta’s LlamaCon conference, Nadella said that the precise figure depends on the programming language.
He added that Microsoft is leaning on AI for more than just code generation. “The agents we have for reviewing code — that usage has increased,” he said, in a sign the company is weaving AI into the full software development cycle.
Nadella isn’t the only Big Tech CEO leaning on AI for coding.
Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during Alphabet’s earnings call that more than 30% of new code at the company is written by AI — up from 25% in October.
At LlamaCon, Nadella asked Zuckerberg how much of Meta’s code was created by AI, but the social media boss couldn’t give a precise figure.
Instead, Zuckerberg gave a prediction for the AI agents Meta’s building to help write and test code for its Llama models: “Our bet is that in the next year, probably, maybe half the development is going be done by AI as opposed to people, and then that will just increase from there.”
For now, Meta is already using AI in more narrowly defined areas, such as ad ranking and feed experiments, where results can be closely measured, Zuckerberg said.
It’s not just the largest tech companies that are embracing AI for coding. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, said in a February earnings call that the company would pause engineer hiring in 2025 because of AI, which he said had increased engineering productivity by 30%.
In January, payments company Stripe laid off 300 employees, including people in engineering roles, Business Insider first reported.
AI isn’t always causing companies to cut back on human coders. Microsoft, for instance, is considering another round of job cuts aimed at middle managers and non-coders, BI first reported. They are focused on increasing the share of contributors who write code by decreasing its “PM ratio” — the number of product or program managers per engineer.
Looking further ahead, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott expects that within five years, 95% of all code will be AI-generated. “Very little is going to be line-by-line human-written code,” he said last month on the 20VC podcast.
Still, he emphasized that humans would remain essential in shaping the high-level structure, goals, and design of software.
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