Microsoft Corp.-owned GitHub today announced a more advanced version of its artificial intelligence-powered coding assistant that can be customized to a company’s codebase and processes.

It’s called GitHub Copilot Enterprise and it’s generally available now. It serves as a companion for developers and lets them ask questions about public and private code and familiarize themselves with new codebases, and also creates consistency across engineering teams, the company said.

Other benefits include being able to customize chat conversations to the organization’s code repositories, so its responses will always be based on its internal knowledge base. There’s also a Bing-powered web search feature that’s currently in beta.

GitHub said the enterprise-grade copilot tool is available to GitHub Enterprise Cloud subscribers only, priced at $39 per user per month.

The original GitHub Copilot for individual developers first launched in 2022 and was followed by a business-grade version. GitHub Copilot Enterprise, which was first announced in November, is a more advanced version, and like its predecessors it integrates into the user’s development environment to provide real-time coding suggestions and other comments as they work. But it also does more than that, with additional features that aren’t available in those lower-tier versions. It also includes enterprise-grade security, GitHub said.

For instance, it supports repository-based semantic search that makes it easier for developers to scour code repos. In addition, it can analyze pull request diffs, or code differences, to help developers better understand any proposed changes. Another new feature is its ability to access internal knowledge bases to make more accurate coding suggestions.

In the coming weeks, GitHub Copilot Enterprise will add support for fine-tuned models, so users will be able to train the chatbot on their own codebases to improve its predictive capabilities and responses.

GitHub Copilot Enterprise is rivaled by a generative AI-based code completion tool called Tabnine Chat, but although the pricing is on a par, Tabnine Ltd.’s offering is more affordable because GitHub users must also pay for a GitHub Enterprise subscription to access its predictive capabilities.

GitHub Chief Executive Thomas Dohmke said the earlier editions of Copilot have defined a new age of software development that has led to clear gains in terms of developer productivity and happiness. The company thinks claims around improving developer productivity are more than justified, citing a six-month study by Accenture Plc. that involved 500 developers. The study found that 90% of those developers reported writing better code thanks to Copilot’s assistance.

Furthermore, the study claimed that 88% of Copilot’s code suggestions were ultimately retained, leading to a 50% improvement in the number of builds made.

GitHub is pushing Copilot as an integral part of the developer experience, but the technology has led to a number of concerns, including its tendency to suggest fee-based tools to users, its use of public codebases and the risk of introducing bugs and vulnerabilities within its code suggestions.

Image: GitHub