Generali boosts developers’ velocity and productivity with GitHub Copilot

Generali, one of the largest insurance and asset management groups worldwide, operates in 50 countries with over 70 million customers. With large and complex projects that require significant coding effort, both in legacy and innovative technologies, Generali wanted to increase their developers' productivity and velocity.

Generali worked collaboratively with Microsoft and deployed GitHub Copilot to support its robust team of developers.

The adoption of GitHub Copilot has accelerated the productivity of Generali’s developers, improved efficiency, and helped increase the delivery rate of software projects.

“We are obsessed with the quality of what we do.”

Michele Carmina, Head of Group Digital Technologies at Generali and Head of Global Digital Factory at Generali Operations Service Platform, is describing the commitment to excellence that the company embodies.

Established in Trieste, Italy in 1832, Generali boasts an Italian heritage with an international outlook and now operates in over 50 countries serving over 70 million customers.

And when it comes to the latest efforts to strengthen their technology assets, having solutions that help their developers code better and faster, is key.

That's why the Italian behemoth - one of the largest global integrated insurance and asset management companies in the world - decided to adopt GitHub Copilot.

The prospect of using Generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot that were already integrated with the development environment used by its team was enticing, says Carmina.

With an existing relationship with Microsoft, the next step was a no-brainer for Generali.

“We want to improve efficiency and be faster in delivering our software projects, improve our overall business and achieve our strategic objectives by being more productive in all phases of the software development life cycle, with a special focus on coding," explains Carmina. And Microsoft was the perfect partner to help them get there.

Early success with experimenting

In early 2024, Generali successfully launched GitHub Copilot in Italy, Germany, and France. It’s now being used by about 2,000 of their developers.

The company began defining concrete targets in terms of efficiency that every country of the group could achieve by adopting the technology in the software development cycle and in particular their coding.

It really took off later in 2024.

One of the key factors of their success was the ease of integration into the development environment. In particular, developers found the Autocomplete and chat function of GitHub Copilot to be highly beneficial tools that they say have helped amplify and augment the capacity and effectiveness of their developers.

Since implementing, they’ve been able to increase both the capacity and velocity to write code with higher efficiency than before.
“The possibility for the developers to start using this tool and see the results without any change in the way they work was a game-changer,” says Carmina.

But what came as a surprise to Carmina was the reaction from developers, who demonstrated an attitude in line with the thinking of “Now I've seen the benefits, and I cannot survive working without it anymore,” in Carmina’s own words.

“The possibility for the developers to start using this tool and see the results without any change in the way they work was a game-changer.”

Michele Carmina, Head of Group Digital Technologies, Generali

Collaboration was key

The process with Generali has been collaborative and continuous with an open flow of feedback. For example, Generali and Microsoft hosted a hackathon in Milan with developers from across the company that proved critical to Generali’s success adopting the technology.

“We are focused on all the phases of the software development lifecycle with the objective to augment the capacity of our people to be supported by the technology, to do better, to do part of the work automatically, and to have more time to review what has been done,” says Carmina.

Generali says this collaborative effort will be an integral part of maintaining success moving forward.

Adopting GitHub Copilot is just the first step in an innovative strategy they plan to continue to iterate and evolve with. The company’s vision in terms of technology is to equip all of its developers with the tools to help accelerate and improve their work.

“We want to be flexible and fast enough to test these technologies very quickly, to have a clear vision, and to adopt it rapidly when we believe that it can bring value,” says Carmina.