The IT labor market is changing: specialists in various roles and areas who have deep expertise in the field of artificial intelligence will gain increasing importance. This is reported by SoftServe, a global digital engineering and technology consulting company.
The study “Redefining the Future of Software Engineering” was conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publication MIT Technology Review. Its goal was to find out how agent-based AI is changing approaches to software development and what the industry can expect in the near future.
The results of the study showed that development teams are already actively using agent-based AI in their work. In particular, 79% of respondents have used AI assistants in the past two years, including for writing code and checking its quality. At the same time, teams are gradually moving towards full-fledged agent engineering across the entire development lifecycle.
Overall, 72% of organizations expect that AI agents will manage most or even all stages of the product lifecycle within the next two years, and 41% predict this within 18 months.
In the field of software development, role changes are expected: specialists will be more responsible for orchestrating agents, creating multi-agent systems, working with context, input data and instructing agents.
While DevOps, cloud and full-stack specialists were previously the priority, now AI engineers are becoming the most in demand in the market. This is the answer of 51% of those surveyed. There will also be an increasing demand for software architects, named by 32% of respondents, and data engineers, named by 29%.
“Overall, the research data demonstrate an important shift in the labor market: so-called “AI-native” specialists will be in demand – experts in various roles and areas with deep expertise in the field of AI,” the report says.
Experts interviewed as part of the study noted that AI helps development teams iterate faster and more often on new ideas during product creation, explore alternative approaches to development and design, better understand user needs, and learn from experts from other industries and domains.
Separately in the study also drew attention to the challenges of implementing AI. According to 44% of respondents, the biggest difficulties are the cost of computing resources and the process of integrating agents.
Despite this, experts are convinced that the transition to agent-based engineering will justify these efforts. Already half of companies consider agent-based AI a priority area of investment, and by 2028, 84% will consider it so.
