- A 37-year-old manager at Microsoft says AI has changed his workflow.
- AI reduced his time spent coding by 70%, and also cut time spent reading and dating, he says.
- But given the rush to scale AI, he also says the time saved is spent on meeting faster deadlines and shipping updates.
This narrative essay is based on a conversation with the 37-year-old Naga Santhosh Reddy Vootukuria senior software engineering manager at Microsoft who is heavily invested in AI. This essay has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider verified his identity, employment and salary rates.
When ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, the whole world was shocked. As a developer, I loved it.
I have worked at Microsoft for nearly 14 years and have been a manager for over a decade. Before ChatGPT came out, I’d say 80% of my day-to-day work was spent coding, and 20% was looking at documentation, writing, brainstorming with my team, and helping junior engineers with various tasks.
With OpenAI and the Microsoft partnership, we have all the tools we need directly from OpenAI, and it’s tightly integrated into Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Visual Studio, which is the bread and butter for what developers use to write code in different languages.
Here’s how AI has changed my work.
Reduced the time I spend coding by 70%
As a developer, AI has significantly improved my efficiency and accuracy.
As a manager, it’s my responsibility to go through my team’s code and make sure it’s 100% quality efficient so I can merge it into main production before we release and deploy.
I had to manually look at every line change. But with the integration with AI, I would say 70% of my time has been reduced. The AI tool integrates my past feedback history to give me code feedback and suggestions.
IT also saves me time with meetings. It used to be very difficult for me. I used to accept most meetings, but then I informed people that unless they aimed questions directly at me, I couldn’t attend. I would ask them to record the meeting and share it with me so I could go over it later.
But with AI, I get an automated transcript of a summary of what was discussed. It also breaks down the tasks or action items I need to do.
None of the tools are 100% accurate, but I’d say 95% to 96% of the time it’s completely accurate, and it’s constantly improving.
IT also saves me time with reading. If a group is releasing a new feature, I have to go through each design document and provide as much feedback as possible. There can be 10 to 15 long design documents and they contain all the granular details.
With Copilot built into Word, a bar appears at the top of the documents and I get a full overview. I no longer have to spend X hours reading the entire document. You can also use a similar tool within email if you’ve been added to a large email thread and have no context.
I still have a full load
While AI has definitely helped overcome mundane tasks, that’s not exactly what my team’s work focuses on. Whenever I’m coming back from using AI, I’m using it for some other job.
In my role, I talk to a lot of customers about released products and they always come back and ask for more features. Then I have to sit down with my team and create a strategy for the release. AI cannot be used in these situations. Once the developers start writing the code for these projects and do the actual work, that’s where we use AI.
At Microsoft, we follow a management framework called the Scrum model, and that means we release in sprints. Every two weeks, we aim to complete several work items and try to complete it. Previously, it could take two or three years for Microsoft to deliver major releases. But with the current model, teams are releasing updates every month or sometimes even every week.
We live in a competitive world. If Google is releasing something, Microsoft should counter it with some other cool feature. Therefore, developers are using AI wherever they can to reduce their time, but they are using any time saved for other tasks or other features.
If you work for a product-based company in the software industry, even if you’re turning back time, you can’t sit back and relax.