How BT Group is Deploying Gen AI Coding Solutions With AWS
BT Group has announced its latest innovation with Amazon Web Services (AWS), deploying its generative AI (Gen AI) coding companion Amazon CodeWhisperer to provide coding assistance to its software engineers, aimed at enhancing product development processes across the business.
The multinational telecommunications company says its partnership with AWS is liberating software developers, allowing them to focus on more strategic goals. In the first four months BT says that Amazon CodeWhisperer has generated more than 100,000 lines of code, automating around 12% of the repetitive and time-consuming work done by software engineers using the platform.
Providing real-time AI-powered code suggestions across 15 coding languages, Amazon CodeWhisperer helps developers code more responsibly and securely, filtering out code suggestions that might be considered biased or unfair and can flag code suggestions that may resemble particular open-source training data. It can also scan for hard-to-detect vulnerabilities and propose code to remediate them.
By using CodeWhisperer, BT Group is improving productivity by providing its software engineers with a sophisticated coding assistant, by automating time consuming and often repetitive tasks.
Gen AI coding solution is delivered within guardrails to ensure responsible AI
According to the companies, the solution is already providing 15-20 suggestions of code per active user per day for BT Group, with an acceptance rate of 37% by its software engineers who are using the platform. Adopting BT Group’s responsible tech principles, 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.
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.
“As we embrace innovation, our commitment to safety and ethics remains unwavering,” adds Adusumilli. “Implementing robust guardrails is not just a priority; it's a cornerstone of our BT Group’s ‘connect for good’ purpose.”
The news follows an announcement in March 2023 that the companies would be combining AWS' cloud expertise with BT’s market-leading infrastructure to bring 5G and 4G mobile edge computing services to UK business customers.
And in December, Technology Magazine spoke with Zoë Webster, BT Group’s AI Director, on the paramount importance of ensuring the quality and quantity of data when building AI. “To develop robust AI models, you need sufficient, high-quality data,” she said. “Different AI techniques have varying data appetites, with deep learning and large language models being particularly data-hungry.”
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