Operator says in first four months, Amazon CodeWhisperer has helped to automate 12% of tedious, repetitive, time-consuming tasks in product development
BT Group’s Digital Unit has deployed a GenAI coding companion, Amazon CodeWhisperer to help software engineers with coding. The companion is provided by AWS.
The operator says this is the first of a suite of GenAI tools to improve product development processes across the business. It is part of its drive for modernisation, efficiency and superior tooling for its workforce.
Amazon CodeWhisperer suggests code in real time, ranging from snippets to full functions, in multiple integrated development environments (IDEs). The suggestions are based on natural-language comments and existing code across 15 coding languages.
First four months
The code companion provides 15 to 20 suggestions of code per active user per day, with an acceptance rate of 37% by software engineers using the platform.
In its first four months, Amazon CodeWhisperer generated more than 100,000 lines of code and automated around 12% of the tedious, repetitive and time-consuming tasks done by an initial group of volunteers.
BT Group has now made the solution more widely available to 1,200 of its engineers across the business.
In addition to wanting to boost productivity, BT claims “developers code more responsibly and securely” using Amazon CodeWhisperer which filters out suggestions that could be biased or unfair. The code companion also flags suggestions with a possible resemblance to specific open-source training data.
Amazon CodeWhisperer scans for hard-to-detect vulnerabilities and proposes code to remediate them.
Guardrails and training
The group says “a comprehensive set of guardrails have been put in place for the business’ software engineering community to ensure transparency, accountability, intellectual property compliance and data privacy are prioritised with Amazon CodeWhisperer in place”.
The roll-out has been accompanied by a custom pathway on BT Group’s Digital Campus learning platform, as well as a number of onboarding sessions.
The idea is to simplify employees’ working routine, while ensuring adherence to the guardrails and safeguarding policies as part of the business’ investment in its people, the operator says.
BT Group’s decision to implement Amazon CodeWhisperer has also been driven by the controls and openness it provides regarding training data, helping to manage risks around intellectual property claims.
GenAI at scale
Deepika Adusumilli, Chief Data and AI Officer, Digital, BT Group said, “The adoption of generative AI solutions on this scale is not just a major milestone for BT Group, but for industry as a whole. It will equip our colleagues for a world of work that is transforming overnight, in turn delivering solutions for our customers quicker than ever before.
“Implementing coding assistance is step one in a wider enablement move for our digital colleagues in AI-supported product lifecycle management.”
Fabio Cerone, Director, Telco Industry, EMEA at AWS added, “Building software applications needs developers to spend a lot of time writing lines of code that aren’t directly related to the core problem that they’re trying to solve.
“Amazon CodeWhisperer changes that. For BT Group, it helps the engineering community to finish coding tasks faster, allowing them to focus on the bigger picture of how they deliver the very best solutions for the business and their customers.”