HP embraces GitHub Copilot, boosts software innovation and speed

HP is a multinational technology company that has played a central role in the tech industry—in fact, its headquarters in Palo Alto is often referred to as the “birthplace of Silicon Valley.” Most known for its range of printing technologies and pioneering leadership in manufacturing personal computers and laptops, HP has always been committed to continually producing technology designed to improve people’s lives. 

With that, the company has been progressing an evolution in software development, including its developer toolchain, management platforms, and applications that support addressing the changing needs of modern consumers. “We have fantastic devices and services for consumer, commercial, enterprise, and industrial—a comprehensive and integrated portfolio of hardware and software solutions,” says Evan Scheessele, Senior Manager, Enterprise Digital Services at HP. “Right now, we’re focused on evolving our tooling and practices as an integrated enterprise to how we develop software and services. Together, we are creating powerful new experiences and solutions, extending on top of our leading portfolio of hardware—and creating new value for our customers and partners.”

To modernize and standardize its software development process, HP needed a way to enhance developer efficiency and productivity, allowing them more time for creativity and innovation. It also meant getting the company’s many thousands of developers globally to be more connected and collaborative.

“We know that to remain agile and competitive as a modern technology company, we have to build deeper digital experiences across hardware, software, and services to meet changing demands for customers. To do that, we had to focus on supporting our developer community,” says Scheessele.

Supporting developers with AI

With a longstanding relationship with Microsoft, HP knew it wanted to tap into the company’s expertise in generative AI. “To stay competitive, we knew we had to embrace AI, and from a developer’s perspective, we wanted to make that easier, giving our developers the tools and resources they need to create and collaborate efficiently, unlocking new value and new speed. GitHub Copilot was the answer,” says Scheessele.

HP trialed GitHub Copilot Business, and after positive results and feedback from an early cohort of excited developers, the company decided to lean further into GitHub Copilot in concert with GitHub Enterprise, giving HP access to AI assistive capabilities optimized for developers. This includes the ability to receive code suggestions in line with source code and a chat interface that helps developers get answers to coding-related questions within supported integrated development environments (IDEs) and command-line interfaces (CLIs).

After incorporating GitHub Copilot into their workflows, HP developers found they could write and review code faster, receiving suggestions for improved code along the way. They used Copilot in conjunction with other familiar elements of an enterprise software toolchain—like GitHub Enterprise, Azure DevOps, and Visual Studio—to create a powerful ecosystem for more efficient software development. Using GitHub Copilot, they could easily assess and update older code and more rapidly problem-solve for new projects. In addition, HP’s developer teams found that using GitHub technologies together helped them achieve a higher level of enterprise development-practices governance and engagement with the developer community as a whole.

“With GitHub Copilot, our developers can focus on creating new solutions and solving bigger challenges and not get bogged down in the minutiae of tedious code scaffolding and programming language syntax,” says Scheessele. “This means our great developers are more focused on their project’s features and customer experience goals, make better software, release more value to the market sooner, and together, the community as a whole better understands our code base across the enterprise, at a level that previously we didn’t see.”

Greater productivity and collaboration

Scheessele says HP currently has several thousand developers actively using GitHub Copilot every day, and developer productivity has increased markedly. Perhaps an equally important value, according to Scheessele, is that adopting GitHub Copilot and coordinating its integration into developers’ workflows has helped HP’s leaders better connect and coordinate across previously disparate developer teams, resulting in more information sharing and more cross-enterprise collaboration.

“GitHub Copilot has enabled a fascinating new opportunity for collaboration, a transformation journey that is engaging the community as a whole—not as siloed scrum teams or distributed pockets of individual developers,” says Scheessele. “It’s been an opportunity to talk about changing technology, the landscape of AI, and what we want to create together with it, now that we have these new superpowers to bring higher-level, higher-quality solutions to market.”

But even with new superpowers, HP teams are eager to learn more and do more with AI. “It’s interesting because we are evolving our expectations while GitHub is evolving Copilot’s features and AI-powered capabilities,” says Scheessele. “A lot of our teams’ feedback shows we are already building on a successful story, bringing generative AI directly into the practice of writing code. That gives us confidence in our ability to respond to future opportunities, at speed, which will ultimately help us create and deliver even more value for our customers.”

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