Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu to engineers on how to survive in AI era: Programming skills are the foundation, but …

Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu

As artificial intelligence reshapes the technology landscape, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu has now offered some candid advice to the software engineers on how they can survive and thrive in the AI-driven era. In a recent post shared on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) Vembu stressed that while programming skills remain essential, the true value lines in deep domain expertise and the ability to deliver security, reliability and compliance to customers. Vembu also noted that the programming skills form the main bedrock of a software engineer’s career, but agreed that they are no longer sufficient on their own.The Zoho chief also acknowledged that AI can escalate the creation of working prototypes but cautioned that creating a finished product includes multiple stages that cannot all be sped up by automation. He advised the teams not to obsess over programmer productivity metrics but instead focus on how AI can improve the overall customer experience.In his post Vembu also highlighted that al of complexity in software development is “needless or incidental” and can be eliminated with AI. By leveraging AI to simplify processes, engineers can concentrate on delivering solutions that are more intuitive and valuable to end users.

Read Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu’s complete post here

Here is what I tell our software engineers on how to thrive in the AI era: be very good domain experts. Programming skills are the foundation (and we definitely don’t want to lose them) but deep domain knowledge is what customers pay for, along with reliability, security, support and compliance.The productivity gains from AI are still hotly debated: we definitely get to a working prototype much faster but a finished product has a lot more to it and not all the stages can be sped up by AI.That is why I advise our technical teams to not obsess about programmer productivity as a metric but focus on how we can offer a far better experience to customers using AI.There is a lot of needless or incidental complexity in software that can be eliminated by AI.