Injecting AI into software development — an ArcTouch blog series

It’s hard to believe that we’re already a quarter of the way into 2024. And we’re working hard, building lovable apps and connected experiences for our world-class clients, as we have for 15 years. On that note, we’re excited to introduce the beginning of an ongoing blog series about how builders like us can use AI to build better digital products.

The idea is to show real examples in which we’ve injected generative AI into our agile app development process. Our builders will share use-case-specific takeaways on the benefits and pitfalls of using AI tools for software development.

So, not just surface-level talk about the promise of AI. We saw enough of that last year. We’ll dig into how AI is impacting our real work.

Why we believe in AI as a tool for software development

If you follow a lot of tech innovators and pundits, you’ve seen many predictions about the expected growth and impact of AI in 2024 and beyond. There is a lot of hyperbole. And there is some cause for concern.

As technology users, AI promises to impact almost every phase of our lives. Startups will have AI at the center of their solutions — and will be well funded because of it.

SOURCE: Ben Evans

More and more new products will have AI built inside them. As our co-founder Adam Fingerman wrote last year, AI “will be as transparent as any other technology that we use and don’t care to understand. It’ll just do its work behind the scenes, quietly enabling features and capabilities we love.”

AI also promises to change many jobs. But it’s important to make a distinction here. There’s a perception that we’re all just passengers and AI will alter our jobs — or maybe even eliminate them — in ways we can’t control. That’s not our belief. By injecting AI into software development, it can augment our capabilities, making builders like us more efficient and even better at what we do. But we decide when, where, and how best to use it.

How can you use AI? That’s entirely up to you. And we hope this blog series will give you some ideas.

AI is many tools for many types of builders

In some ways, AI is like many other tech tools that builders of digital experiences use. And we’ve used many software development tools since we started ArcTouch in 2009.

Each new technology promises some benefit to us — whether it’s making a process more efficient or offering some new capability that can help us improve the user experience of our products.

But AI is also different than many other tools. That’s because it is many tools that can optimize how we work in many areas. And this is where our blog series gets real.

We’ll look at the specific ways our product strategists, designers, engineers, and QA professionals are injecting AI into their workflow. Each post in this series will reinforce these common themes:

• AI isn’t a turn-key solution to doing anything. You can’t just give it a task and call it a day. Rather, it’s a technology we can use to augment our work – saving us some time in certain areas so we can focus on others.

• Using AI isn’t about saving money. It’s about driving productivity and increasing efficiency. And that efficiency gain allows builders like us to devote more of our time to tasks that deliver more value to ArcTouch and our clients.

• For every hour or day we can save by smartly automating tasks, we can redirect that time (and our clients’ budgets) to adding great new features, polishing our designs, and perfecting the user experience.

So, are you ready to follow along? We hope so. Because it’s 2024. And it’s time to get real about AI.

Follow along

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About ArcTouch

ArcTouch has been building lovable apps, websites, and connected experiences for more than 15 years. And now we’re using AI to do that faster and better than ever before. Want to learn more? Contact us for a free consultation.