Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has gone on record saying he believes 20-30% of the company’s code was written by AI, rather than human programmers.

Microsoft is one of the leading AI companies, first investing heavily in OpenAI and integrating its GPT models in its Copilot. More recently, the company has been investing in its own home-grown AI models in an effort to reduce its reliance on OpenAI.

In a fireside chat that included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, via TechCrunch, Nadella said 20-30% of the company’s code was “written by software,” another way of saying ‘written by AI.’

As TechCrunch points out, Google CEO Sundar Pichai cited a similar figure for his company at its recent earnings report, saying AI accounted for 30% of Google’s code.

AI’s Future In Software Development

The industry is still very much split on the future of AI, particularly within the software development industry. Some companies and executives are embracing it wholeheartedly, convinced AI will write the bulk of future programming code.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott is one such executive.

“95% is going to be AI-generated,” Scott said on the 20VC podcast, via Business Insider. “Very little is going to be — line by line — is going to be human-written code.”

“Now, that doesn’t mean that the AI is doing the software engineering job, and so I think the more important and interesting part of authorship is still going to be entirely human,” he added.

In contrast, Neil Sahota, CEO of ACSILabs and the United Nations’ AI Advisor, is less optimistic.

“While A-SWE can write code, it doesn’t understand the ‘why’ behind it,” Sahota said, via ZDNet. “AI can mimic logic. However, it doesn’t grasp context, business nuance, or edge cases that real-world systems need. Generating [create, read, update, and delete] operations is great, but it’s a different approach to architect scalable, secure solutions under tight constraints.”

Only time will tell which prediction will come through, but it is a telling revelation that both Microsoft and Google are seeing as much as 30% of their code written by AI.