DH Interview | 'AI lowers the barrier to becoming a developer': GitHub Regional Sales Director Nahas Mohammed

Bengaluru: GitHub is an AI-powered developer platform, and India is home to the second-largest developer community on the Microsoft-owned platform. In October last year, GitHub in its Octoverse report pointed out that India added over 5.2 million developers in 2025, which accounts for a little over 14% of GitHub’s total 36 million new developers in 2025. Currently, there are about 24 million developers in the country.

In a candid interview, Nahas Mohammed, Director, Enterprise, GitHub, tells Uma Kannan of DH that India has overtaken the US to become the world's largest source of open-source contributors, writing, maintaining, and improving the software the entire global technology economy runs on. Edited excerpts:

India is now one of the fastest-growing developer communities on GitHub. What is driving this momentum?

India's developer growth has multiple engines behind it. A domestic tech sector growing fast enough to generate its own gravitational pull on developer talent. A startup ecosystem building products for the world — India now has over 100 unicorns, and behind each one of them is an engineering team solving hard problems and driving the next wave of innovation. India is the world's innovation engine — global enterprises have moved well-past 'India for delivery' and are now choosing India for innovation. And underneath all of it, an education system that made a long-term bet on technology — coding in schools, technically-ambitious universities, and a graduate pipeline operating at scale. All these elements have converged to create the world’s fastest-growing developer community.

How is India positioning itself in the global AI market?

The real question is how India channels 24 million developers into sustained global influence in the AI market, and that requires deliberate choices. First, accelerating innovation by moving developers up the value-chain, and creating environments where developers can move fast, build ambitiously, and work with the best tools available to build the future of AI. Second, using AI to keep the community growing.

One of the most-important things AI does is to lower the barrier to becoming a developer. It makes the craft more accessible, helps new developers get productive faster, and opens the doors for more to start experimenting and getting into the field. We see this in our own data: 80% of new developers joining GitHub adopt Copilot within their first week, showing that AI-assisted development has become a baseline expectation, not a differentiator. For India, where the developer community is already growing at over 36% annually, this matters enormously. More developers getting productive faster means more experimentation, more innovation, and more people building AI-powered solutions to India's own challenges. A growing developer community using AI to build AI isn't just good for India's technology sector — it's how India builds a self-reinforcing innovation ecosystem that keeps accelerating.

How are tech companies adopting AI-assisted coding tools, and what impact does it have on software development?

Across India, companies are embedding AI throughout the entire software development lifecycle — and adoption spans well-beyond the technology sector. Global GSIs (Global System Integrators) are rolling out GitHub's AI-powered platform at scale. Infosys and Wipro have both launched GitHub Centres of Excellence — physical experience centres dedicated to AI-powered software development. When engineering organisations of this scale embed AI deeply into how they work, they're reshaping how software gets delivered to businesses and governments across every major economy. The practices being developed inside these organisations are becoming the global reference point for AI-powered software development. Software is the world's most-valuable export. India has long delivered it. Now it's defining how it gets built.

When you give developers tools like GitHub Copilot, you free them from the repetitive and the routine, and they spend more time on the problems that actually require human judgment and creativity. The companies that understand that distinction are the ones pulling ahead.

India recently became a leading contributor to open source. What does this mean for its global tech influence?

For the first time, India has overtaken the US to become the world's largest source of open-source contributors and ranks second in contributions to public generative AI projects. Open source is where some of the world's most-useful technology gets built, so leading here means Indian developers are setting direction, establishing standards, and shaping infrastructure. AI tools also have a key role to play in the open source story. It lowers the barrier to contribution, helps new developers understand complex projects faster, and shortens the path from idea to implementation. And that opportunity grows when AI tools are accessible to every developer, not just those inside established ecosystems. But open source leadership isn't self-sustaining, and this is where the industry needs to come together. Companies have a real responsibility here — contributing back to the open-source projects they depend on and creating space for their developers to participate.

What role will GitHub and AI tools like Copilot play in shaping the next generation of Indian developers?

The first generation of truly AI-native developers is graduating into the workforce right now. AI is embedded into how they work, and with India's scale, even a fraction of that cohort producing breakthrough innovations changes the global technology landscape. India has created a developer pipeline no other country matches. But policy can only go so far. The industry has a responsibility to meet that next generation where they are, equip them with the tools they'll actually use in the workforce, and help close the gap between education and a real technical career. That's why GitHub Education exists. It's free, globally-accessible, and gives every verified student access to Copilot. This means that by the time they graduate, developers have the skills needed to run with AI-powered software development.

Keeping that pipeline strong requires the entire ecosystem — policy, industry, and platforms — to invest in making sure every aspiring developer in India, regardless of where they study or who they know, has a genuine shot at the global stage. That's how India's developer community keeps growing and keeps leading.