Gartner® Predicts 2026: AI Potential and Risks Emerge in Software Engineering Technologies
Prevent AI-generated code from becoming your biggest security and quality liability.
AI coding tools promise faster delivery, but Gartner warns they’re creating a hidden crisis: by 2028, prompt-to-app approaches adopted by citizen developers will increase software defects by 2500%, triggering a software quality and reliability crisis. This isn’t just a code quality issue—it’s a business risk that will consume innovation budgets through expensive remediation. This report shows security and engineering leaders how to capture AI’s productivity gains while avoiding the quality crisis through governance, validation frameworks, and architectural controls.
According to Gartner,
“A new class of defect is emerging as AI generates context-deficient code. While syntactically correct, AI output often lacks awareness of the broader system architecture and nuanced business rules, introducing subtle but severe flaws.”
Read the report to learn how:
- “Prompt-to-app” approaches lower the barrier to entry for generating code and prototyping, but can introduce deep, contextual defects that are exponentially more expensive to fix than simple coding errors.
- Generative AI (GenAI) tools are not a quick fix for legacy technology modernization. Success requires clarity in human-AI collaboration, as well as organizational readiness for agentic AI.
- AI agent cost overruns are a top concern of IT executives. Most buyers attribute these overruns to increased usage under consumption-based pricing models.
Download the full Gartner report to get actionable strategies for governing AI-generated code before it becomes technical debt.
Gartner, Predicts 2026: AI Potential and Risks Emerge in Software Engineering Technologies, Annie Hodgkins, Brent Stewart, Howard Dodd, Joachim Herschmann, Philip Walsh, Arun Batchu. Published 2025.
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