GitHub is doubling down on its copilot strategy with the launch of Copilot Chat, Copilot Enterprise and a series of tools designed to enhance software development productivity and collaboration.

At GitHub Universe 2023, GitHub outlined its latest offerings and roadmap. The company, owned by Microsoft, is copilot-happy just like its parent. However, GitHub Copilot is aimed at what is among the top generative AI use cases--software development productivity. GitHub noted a study from last year citing a 55% boost in developer productivity with copilots.

Real-world developer productivity gains are on par with GitHub's findings. Speaking at Constellation Research's Connected Enterprise, Pauline Yang, a Partner at Altimeter Capital speaking on the same CCE panel, laid out the software development economics. Yang said:

"One of the big use cases that we've seen really take off is developer productivity. If you talk to CTOs, they have all these different metrics--how happy their developers are, how much more pull requests are they getting, or how more productive their senior engineers are. We believe that a lot of companies are becoming software companies, even if you're not selling software, and the costs of engineers right now are so high that 40% productivity gains with your engineers is massive and so is happiness of paid developers. All of those gains are economic value."

Given that backdrop it's not surprising that GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke said the company is "re-founded on Co-Pilot." In a blog post, Dohmke said: "It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy—and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience."

To that end, GitHub announced the following:

  • GitHub Copilot Enterprise, which can be personalized for an enterprise's code base including private code. This private code personalization capability was also cited by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy as a big use case for Amazon Code Whisperer. GitHub Copilot Enterprise will be available in February for $39 per user per month. Copilot Business is $19 per user per month.
  • GitHub Copilot Chat will be generally available in December as part of the GitHub Copilot subscription. GitHub Copilot Chat will be powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, have an inline Copilot Chat within the context of code editing, slash commands for big tasks and be available in JetBrains suite. GitHub Copilot Chat will also be integrated into the GitHub website and the company's mobile app.
  • GitHub Copilot Partner Program, an ecosystem that will add third-party developer tools to GitHub Copilot. There are more than 25 debut partners including Datadog, Postman and Datastax.
  • GitHub Advanced Security, which is a vulnerability prevention system for large language models. The AI-driven tools are available in preview and will be included in GitHub Advanced Security subscriptions.
  • GitHub Copilot Workspace, which is an early demo for GitHub Next. GitHub said its next-generation Copilot Workspace will be delivered in 2024.

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