How Agentic AI Will Impact Software Engineering
Computerworld, Monday, August 18th, 2025
Your weekly round-up of the questions asked by readers of CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World examines how agentic AI will change the careers of software developers; how useful is Microsoft CoPilot in Excel; and what are the security challenges of using AI for data platforms.
AI-powered coding agents are now real and usable. Indeed, coding agents are all around us, touching on every aspect of the software development life cycle, and recently InfoWorld outlined 12 of the best.
This raised in the minds of our readers the bigger question, which they rushed to ask Smart Answers: how will this impact my career?
Smart Answers may be a generative AI tool, but it is not in the business of replacing humans. Using our decades of human reporting it predicts that by 2027, agentic AI tools will significantly impact software engineering careers, necessitating an evolution in workflows and skill sets.