Some big companies have recently been crowing about how much of their code is generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
In Google’s first quarter earnings call this year, CEO Sundar Pichai said that the use of AI internally had been “transformative.”
He said that that “well over 30%” of code involved people accepting AI-suggested solutions, up from the 25% he announced in the Q3 2024 earnings call last October.
Google is not alone.
In an April 2025 fireside chat between Microsoft boss Satya Nadella and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the former said: “I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code … and some of our projects are probably all written by software.”
Why is the metric so important?
The answer is productivity and, by extension, profitability.
A study of 4,867 developers at Microsoft, Accenture and an anonymous Fortune 100 company found that there was a 26% increase in completed tasks among developers using AI tools and that junior developers enjoyed even bigger productivity boosts.
The rise in adoption is far from unexpected. According to Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey in 2024, 61.8% of developers are using AI in the development process, up from 44% in 2023; a further 12.8% of developers said they intend to use such tools soon.
Should travel companies be following Google and Microsoft and sharing this metric alongside more traditional metrics?
Jon Pickles, founder of Sygnifiq and chair of the Travel Technology Initiative does not believe companies should be using such a metric since there is no precedent to do so.
“Enhancements, refactorings, auto-completions, code linters, code review tools, macros, templates, etc. have all been used; none of these were required to be declared,” he said. “Many of them assist development, change style, speed work, but we didn’t have a norm of publicly quantifying them. AI is in many ways just a new form of assistance,” he said.
John Morhous, CXO and former CIO of Flight Centre Travel Group, said, “There is no universal metric that says writing X% of code with AI makes you good or bad, but we use the number to demonstrate our commitment to using innovative technologies (like AI) to do things more efficiently, which ultimately translates to greater shareholder value.”
