Dive Brief:
- GitHub Copilot for Business now sports a conversational chat functionality in beta, the company announced Thursday. The capability will enable developers to request personalized assistance, real-time guidance, tips for security fixes, code analysis and simple troubleshooting.
- “As the centerpiece feature of GitHub Copilot X, we believe Copilot Chat will swing the doors wide open to a new age where natural language powers the coding experience,” the company said in the blog post.
- GitHub first teased a chat functionality in Copilot in March when the company unveiled Copilot X powered by GPT-4. Businesses can access GitHub Copilot Chat by adjusting the organizational settings within Visual Studio or VS Code and accepting the terms and conditions, the company said in a blog post.
Dive Insight:
GitHub Copilot for Business debuted in February, after the company created a waitlist for the business-specific version of the tool in November. The Codex model includes AI-based security, automatically blocking common insecure code suggestions by targeting hardcoded credentials and SQL and path injections.
Microsoft-owned GitHub announced the updates as vendors began promoting AI-infused tools as part of a vendorwide generative AI push. Now, a few months later, vendors are releasing tools more broadly.
Details on pricing have also arrived.
Copilot for business starts at $19 per user per month, and according to GitHub, more than 20,000 organizations use the tool within IT and technology operations.
Microsoft said its Microsoft 365 Copilot tool will be priced at $30 per user per month Tuesday, but the company did not release when it would be broadly available for enterprise users.
Salesforce released its generative AI technology, Einstein GPT Trust layer, Service GPT and Sales GPT, in general availability with pricing details Wednesday.
Many tech leaders are turning to AI-powered tools to augment employees’ work. Almost One-third of tech leaders say generative AI adoption is likely to have the most impact on testing, debugging and optimizing code, according to a Jet Rockets survey of 400 CIOs and CTOs published in May.
There’s more competition in the AI-powered coding assistant market as generative AI vendors target coding capabilities for their large language models. Anthropic placed “special emphasis” on improving Claude 2’s ability to act as a coding assistant, bumping its score on a human-level Python coding test from 56% using Claude 1.3 to 71.2% with Claude 2, according to the company’s research.
