GitHub, announced that GitHub Copilot is now generally available. Since the early days of GitHub Copilot, customers have asked for a copilot that is customised to their own organisation’s code and processes. Developers spend more time deciphering rather than shipping when they can’t pinpoint and solve the issues, bugs, or vulnerabilities that are unique to their organization’s codebase.
Developers often write code for only a couple hours a day and, instead of being creative, are bogged down with mundane tasks throughout their day. The inaccessibility of institutional knowledge acts as a blockade preventing developers from fully exercising their creativity and building more for you.
Just by integrating generative AI into the editor, GitHub Copilot has quickly defined a new age of software development, resulting in clear gains in developer productivity and happiness. GitHub is today bringing the next frontier of developer tools with the general availability of GitHub Copilot Enterprise–a companion that places the institutional knowledge of your organisation at your developer’s fingertips. Now, team members can ask questions about public and private code, get up to speed quickly with new codebases, build greater consistencies across engineering teams, and ensure that everyone has access to the same standards and work that’s previously been done.
GitHub Copilot Enterprise comes with three core features
Gain a deeper understanding of your organisation’s unique codebase. Copilot Enterprise streamlines code navigation and comprehension for developers, enabling faster feature implementation, issue resolution, and code modernisation. It empowers junior developers to contribute quicker, assists senior developers in handling live incidents, and aids in modernizing aging codebases by offering clear code summaries, relevant suggestions, and quick answers to queries about code behavior.
Quickly access organisational knowledge and best practices. Copilot Enterprise integrates chat directly into GitHub.com, enabling developers to ask questions and receive answers in natural language on your codebase, and will guide them to relevant documentation or existing solutions. This can facilitate rapid iteration at scale while improving code with personalized assistance and suggestions tailored to an organization’s specific codebase and standards.
Review pull requests faster. With generated pull request summaries, developers can spend less time drafting and more time merging. With Copilot Enterprise’s capability to analyze pull request diffs, reviewers can quickly get up to speed with proposed changes and save time understanding the changes while spending more time providing valuable feedback.
Thomas Dohmke, CEO at GitHub, said: “As the technology landscape continues to rapidly evolve, we are expanding the capabilities of GitHub Copilot to not only understand your internal knowledge bases but to bring in the latest information from the internet as well. By integrating Bing search directly into Copilot Chat—available in beta for GitHub Copilot Enterprise—you can find the latest software development-related information like updates to CSS or JavaScript frameworks. This means GitHub Copilot can now help your developers explore their curiosity and gain outside knowledge near instantly, at scale.”
GitHub is already hearing from engineering leaders about the benefits they’re seeing from Copilot Enterprise:
“With Copilot Enterprise, Copilot Chat provides personalized recommendations for our developers, making it easier for developers to quickly understand the context. Already, our developers are accepting 24,000 lines of code every day with Copilot, enabling us to ship innovations to our customers faster,” said Mark Côté, Director of Developer Infrastructure, Shopify.
“Personalized, natural language recommendations are now at the fingertips of all our developers at Figma. Copilot Enterprise has improved collaboration across the SDLC by making it easier for our engineers to source and find information via Copilot Chat. We’re also seeing a significant increase in overall developer productivity. Our engineers are coding faster, collaborating more effectively, and building better outcomes,” said Tommy MacWilliam, Engineering Manager for Infrastructure, Figma.
GitHub Copilot is becoming an integral part of the developer experience. Its capabilities, such as quickly understanding existing codebases, analyzing code, and accessing knowledge bases, enable developers to concentrate more on what truly counts: delivering impactful results. And not only can they be more productive, developers will be more happy and fulfilled, too.
GitHub’s vision is to make conversational capabilities ubiquitous by integrating context-driven and customized assistance across the GitHub platform. Throughout the development and evolution of GitHub Copilot the focus has remained on security, privacy, compliance, and transparency—and it is a key focus of GitHub Copilot Enterprise as well.
In 2023, GitHub collaborated with Accenture to evaluate the impact of GitHub Copilot on accelerating innovation within a real-world, enterprise environment.
Below are the findings
GitHub Copilot helped developers at Accenture stay in the flow and minimize interruptions. 94% of developers reported that using GitHub Copilot helped them remain in the flow and spend less effort on repetitive tasks. And 90% of developers spent less time searching for information.
GitHub Copilot helped developers push better-quality code to production. Developers retained 88% of the code suggested by GitHub Copilot in the editor and around 90% of developers reported that they committed code containing Copilot suggestions. GitHub Copilot helped developers write better code and upskill while working. 90% of developers reported writing better code with GitHub Copilot—and roughly 95% of developers learned from Copilot suggestions.
This was all just with GitHub Copilot as an autocomplete function in the editor. With GitHub Copilot Enterprise, we are building on top of the demonstrated results, dramatically multiplying existing GitHub Copilot productivity gains by adding extensive customisation to enable organisations and engineering teams to accomplish more, faster, and happier.
Available today
The age of copilots has begun. In this new frontier of software development, copilots are ubiquitous, customised, and always at your side. With GitHub Copilot Enterprise we’re bringing the industry’s premier AI developer tool available to every organization for just $39 per user per month. Built with the world’s leading large language model, customised to your organisation, and deeply integrated into GitHub’s surfaces, GitHub Copilot Enterprise brings immense value to every organization.
Alongside GitHub Enterprise, our end-to-end developer platform, organisations of any size can now start integrating generative AI across the software development lifecycle—from understanding existing code and internal best practices to fixing bugs and improving functionality to accelerated code reviews and beyond.
Collaboration between humans and intelligent machines will redefine the possibilities of innovation, unlocking novel solutions, and accelerating the pace of software development like never before.
