If you're not using AI to write code, you risk stagnation, says Perplexity’s Aravind Srinivas

Perplexity AI founder Aravind Srinivas.

If engineers are not using artificial intelligence (AI) to write codes, they are at the risk of stagnating with old workflows, Perplexity AI co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Aravind Srinivas has said.

Speaking at News18 Rising Bharat Summit in New Delhi on April 9, Srinivas said integrating AI into coding would offer productivity gains and require fewer people. It would also allow companies to take up a lot more projects, which, in turn, would save jobs that are feared to be disrupted by AI, the startup founder co-founder said.

“If you are not using AI when you are writing code, you are essentially stagnating yourself by sticking to the old workflow and old tooling. People who do use AI to write code are getting work done faster,” he said. “We do see internally, there are some engineers very good at using AI for writing code, no matter whether it is through GitHub Co-pilot, end to end deployment apps, or standalone tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity – they are able to get done work.”

Engineers can now write codes and do the testing within days, which would have taken weeks earlier, he added.

Perplexity is a AI-powered answer engine that is seeking to disrupt Google's flagship search engine.

Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. It was last valued at $9 billion after raising $500 million in a funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners.

The startup, which counts Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its backers, is said to be in talks to double its valuation to $18 billion.

Message for Indian engineers

According to Srinivas, engineers in India should definitely use AI as much as possible to write code and software.

“You will definitely need fewer people to do the work, but that doesn’t mean you won’t need people. You are just going to find a lot more projects. We can get a lot more software projects, a lot more competing products in the same category and so many new categories of products that don’t exist in India yet,” he said.

The comments reflect the disruption facing the traditional IT services industry in India, which is seeing shorter deal tenures and sizes, as AI cuts project completion timelines driving productivity gains for the customers.

Nearly, 60 percent of new deals are seeing shorter tenures, Moneycontrol has reported.

“This also means that people with a lot of creative taste no longer need to be code monkeys to get paid for something. They can have AI to do those things. They can be a lot more liberated to push new ideas into production by themselves, own users, build businesses by their own, potentially get a million dollars in revenue,” Srinivas said.