India has become GitHub’s fastest-growing developer hub and innovation centre, with the Microsoft-owned platform projecting that the country will surpass the United States with more than 57.5 million users by 2030. The country is also home to 21.9 million developers building on GitHub, making it the second-largest developer community in the world after the United States.From student skilling initiatives to enterprise AI adoption, GitHub is deepening its India-first strategy, according to chief operating officer Kyle Daigle, who recently spoke to ET. The company offers its Student Developer Pack free to Indian learners and provides year-long support to early-stage startups through its GitHub for Startups programme.Daigle noted that Indian IT services companies are leading globally in AI co-creation. Companies such as Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, and Accenture are building centres of excellence around GitHub Copilot and running internal innovation drives including hackathons and AI agent trials.Since being acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018, GitHub has evolved from a code-hosting service to a full-stack AI development platform. Its AI coding assistant, GitHub Copilot, now has 20 million all-time users, and the product alone generates more revenue than the entire company did at the time of its acquisition.Following its move to make Copilot free for all users in December 2024, GitHub added 36 million users globally in 2025, bringing its total user base to 180 million. Daigle said the platform’s next phase will be anchored in AI-native software development, where intelligent agents handle everything from code generation to testing and deployment.

Why AI has NOT made “learn to code” obsolete

GitHub is undergoing a leadership transition, with Thomas Dohmke stepping down as CEO this August. GitHub will now join Microsoft’s CoreAI division led by Jay Parikh, the former global head of engineering at Meta who joined Microsoft in October 2024. In a recent podcast interview, Dohmke made it clear that companies with a smart vision for the future will not be slashing tech jobs, but rather expanding their engineering teams to take full advantage of AI’s power. “The companies that are the smartest are going to hire more developers,” he said. “Because if you 10x a single developer, then 10 developers can do 100x.” His arithmetic is simple — and optimistic: artificial intelligence is not a subtractive force, but a multiplier.Dohmke debunked the growing myth that AI alone can spawn billion-dollar businesses without human coding knowledge. “The idea that AI without any coding skills lets you just build a billion-dollar business is mistaken,” Dohmke said. “Because if that were the case, everyone would do it.” His message is clear: Please note that AI is a remarkable tool, not a magic wand.