GenAI Accelerates App Development in Brazil

Enterprises in Brazil have begun broadly adopting generative AI (GenAI) for application development and maintenance in 2024, according to a new research report published today by Information Services Group (ISG) (Nasdaq: III), a leading global technology research and advisory firm.

The 2024 ISG Provider Lens Next-Gen ADM Services report for Brazil finds that GenAI has become a core part of application services, pushing Agile methodology into the background. Organizations in Brazil are willing to invest in new technologies for higher quality and efficiency, the report says. They are using GenAI to help IT departments deliver better applications and business functions in less time without increasing budgets. While it adds new tasks and may not cut the total cost of development, GenAI is already delivering gains in productivity.

“Companies in Brazil are constantly working to reduce time to market on the applications they create,” said Shafqat Azim, ISG partner and Americas lead, Digital Transformation. “They are beginning to recognize GenAI’s potential to help them deliver better code more quickly.”

Advanced GenAI features that have emerged this year could allow enterprises to significantly reshape development processes, ISG says. For example, end users can use a voice interface to tell a GenAI tool what a proposed application should do, then have the tool document the requirements and ask more questions to complete the software’s specifications. In the coding phase, a programmer can write prompts and have GenAI write the code. GenAI can also inspect code and perform functional testing.

However, GenAI does not replace humans in defining what software does for users or how it is created, including program flow, logic, architecture and business rules, the report says. GenAI requires human review to check for hallucinations and deviations from best practices. As a result, the technology does not pose a threat to project managers, business analysts, developers and other professionals with high-level expertise.

Most Brazilian companies that have embarked on GenAI projects with service providers demand a proof of concept to understand the business value and go through long decision-making processes, ISG says. They consider how to comply with restrictions on the use of GenAI, which encompass privacy, security, compliance, IP, legal responsibility and other issues.