GitHub Copilot Chat beta now available for every organization

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Earlier this year, we announced GitHub Copilot X, which featured a number of technical previews designed to bring the power of generative AI and GPT-4 throughout the entire developer experience on GitHub. Today, we’re excited to take a first step in bringing GitHub Copilot X to enterprise companies and organizations with a limited public beta release of GitHub Copilot Chat for all business users on Visual Studio and VS Code.

This new evolution turns GitHub Copilot into a context-aware conversational assistant right in the IDE, allowing developers to execute some of the most complex tasks with simple prompts. Every developer on your team, from the least to the most experienced, will be able to build entire applications or debug vast arrays of code in a matter of minutes instead of a matter of days. Weeks or months spent slogging over unit tests and endless backlogs of boilerplate code will be a thing of the past. As the centerpiece feature of GitHub Copilot X, we believe Copilot Chat will swing the doors wide open to a new age where natural language powers the coding experience, democratizing software development as we know it and making entire teams of developers happier and more productive.

This will constitute a better future for every developer and organization. Let’s jump in on today’s announcement, and the key features your organization can harness to empower your developers to build their best.

How businesses can enable GitHub Copilot Chat beta

GitHub Copilot for Business administrators can offer access to this new beta to their development teams with the following steps:

Enterprise admins:

Enterprise administrators have the ability to grant organization administrators the authority to configure settings for their individual organizations or to apply a uniform setting across all organizations. To accomplish this, enterprise admins can access their admin page, navigate to the “Policies” tab, and select “Copilot”. Within this section, you will be presented with the option to either permit or restrict Copilot Chat (beta) access for all your organizations or delegate the decision to org administrators by choosing “No policy.”

Organization admins:

1. Navigate to Copilot settings. Admins can find the GitHub Copilot settings by going to their organization’s settings page and clicking on the “Copilot” tab.
2. Click on the “Policies” tab. The “Policies” tab within the “Copilot” tab is where admins can configure the settings for GitHub Copilot Chat beta.
3. Accept the terms and conditions. To enable GitHub Copilot Chat beta for all users, admins need to accept the terms and conditions. This can be done by selecting the option “Allowed.” Please note that you will only have the capability to allow chat beta access if you either do not have an enterprise admin or if your enterprise admin has granted you permission by setting their policy to “No Policy.”

A GitHub administrator enabling the limited beta of GitHub Copilot Chat for their development teams.

Once the admin accepts the terms, all users within the organization will receive an email containing detailed installation instructions to help them begin their journey with GitHub Copilot Chat beta.

The power of context

GitHub Copilot Chat isn’t just a chat window. It’s contextually aware of the code a developer has typed or what error messages are shown. And that context is key—unlike a general purpose generative AI chat assistant, GitHub Copilot Chat is designed for developers and fits right into the IDE. In short, we’re taking what works for general purpose and making it contextually aware of a developer’s environment.

All of this is designed to keep developers in the flow, which has become increasingly challenging amid an explosion of languages, cloud computing, programming frameworks, CI/CD workflows, open source software, package managers, services, and more over the past 20 years.

Developers today can build more than ever. Yet, they also are spending more and more time spelunking through documentation and search results to figure out how to connect to an API, use a new database, or understand what a colleague was trying to accomplish.

Research proves as much. According to Stack Overflow’s 2023 Developer Survey, 63% of developers say they spend at least 30 minutes a day and up to two hours looking for answers and solutions. And that’s time they’re not able to be creative or innovate on new solutions for their customers.

We want to help developers spend their time on what matters most: building what’s next. And this work started with GitHub Copilot offering code suggestions right in the IDE—but now with GitHub Copilot Chat, developers can not only get code suggestions, but ask questions, get explanations, offer prompts for code, and more. That means they’re spending more time in the IDE—and in the flow.

GitHub Copilot for Business now includes a beta of GitHub Copilot Chat for VS Code and Visual Studio

GitHub Copilot Chat is more than a chat window. It recognizes what code a developer has typed, what error messages are shown, and it’s deeply embedded into the IDE. Key features include:

• Personalized assistance. GitHub Copilot Chat offers context-specific support to developers. So, whether your engineers are stuck on a particular code snippet or need guidance on a specific programming concept, GitHub Copilot Chat is ready to help.
• Real-time guidance. GitHub Copilot Chat suggests best practices, tips, and solutions tailored to specific coding challenges—all in real time.
• Fixing security issues. GitHub Copilot Chat can make suggestions for remediation, helping to reduce the number of vulnerabilities found during security scans.
• Code analysis. Don’t know what a code block is supposed to do? Ask GitHub Copilot Chat. It can also break down complex concepts and explain code snippets.
• Simple troubleshooting. Trying to debug code? GitHub Copilot Chat not only identifies issues, but also offers suggestions, explanations, and alternative approaches.

Leveling up the original AI pair programmer

As the world’s first at-scale AI pair programer, GitHub Copilot is already helping more than 20,000 companies and teams of developers with the ability to do their work in half the time. And in research from the analyst firm Keystone.AI and Harvard Business School professor Marco Iansiti, we found that generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot have the potential to increase global GDP (gross domestic product) by $1.5 trillion by 2030 by driving significant productivity gains.

We believe this is just the starting point of the economic and productivity gains developers will experience with the power of generative AI.

As we prepare to bring the entirety of GitHub Copilot X to general availability, we believe every developer could be made 10 times more productive. This means 10 days of work, done in one day. 10 hours of work, done in one hour. 10 minutes of work, done with a single prompt command. This will allow your developers to amplify their truest self-expression. And it will help a new generation of developers learn and build at the speed of thought.

Enable GitHub Copilot Chat beta for your organization

All GitHub Copilot for Business users now have access to a limited GitHub Copilot Chat beta, bringing the power of conversational coding right to the IDE.