Techie hiring service Andela says it has trained 200 software developers in the nuances of GitHub Copilot as part of a multi-year effort to bridge the alleged AI talent gap.

The initiative, created in partnership with Microsoft's GitHub, is expected to train an additional 1,000 coders this year and 2,000 in 2026. It comes from the Andela AI Academy, a program that aims to make developers on the labor platform more marketable by updating their skill sets.

Andela's business involves hiring out technical teams recruited from a global pool of developers to corporate clients like GitHub, Mastercard, and Mindshare – with purported savings of around [1]$80,000 per developer . The company claims 60 percent of its developers come from Latin America and Africa, where [2]wages tend to be lower than in the US or Europe.

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The GitHub Copilot training is similar in concept to Andela's Kubernetes African Developer Training Program, undertaken with support from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It represents an attempt to address the supposed [4]imbalance between AI talent demand and supply .

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"In the GitHub Copilot training program, they're learning how to be experts in GitHub Copilot itself," said Carrol Chang, Andela CEO, in an interview with The Register . "The reason we chose GitHub Copilot after having looked at a bunch of different code editing and code creation tools in the market is that GitHub Copilot is the clear winner across enterprise customers."

Enterprise customers, said Chang, are largely choosing GitHub Copilot because of the security features and other business-oriented capabilities. Yet they're not getting as much out of it as they could due to low usage.

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"What we see with GitHub Copilot is that an enterprise might buy 100 seats – let's say, 100 licenses to Copilot," said Chang. "And maybe they're seeing low adoption. They might see 20 percent adoption."

By training developers how to use GitHub Copilot more efficiently, Andela may reduce the risk of enterprise contracts being cancelled for lack of utilization. But it also may be able to demonstrate one of the common claims made about generative AI technology – that it can make users more productive, in terms of GitHub Copilot if nothing else.

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"The power of these tools is that it makes you a superhuman developer and it's supposed to make your job easier, but you don't actually see a lot of developers going and embracing this," said Chang, "because there's this shock and denial that happens with change."

Chang said the program helps developers use GitHub Copilot more efficiently but couldn't say for certain whether having AI help improves developer productivity overall – for which [12]there's [13]contradictory [14]evidence .

"I feel optimistic about the productivity gains that we are going to see, but I haven't measured it quantitatively yet," said Chang. "That is exactly what we are asking of our first cohort that just developed. We've got half of them that are already staffed on Andela clients. And we are asking the clients questions like, 'are you seeing productivity gains? Are you seeing code quality improved?' So those are the metrics that we're going to be tracking." ®

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[1] https://www.andela.com/customer-stories

[2] https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-country/

[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aLhmFdXuWaTDG0i7OnuiBAAAAIA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[4] https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/cea/written-materials/2025/01/14/ai-talent-report/

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aLhmFdXuWaTDG0i7OnuiBAAAAIA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aLhmFdXuWaTDG0i7OnuiBAAAAIA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/02/goldman_sachs_ai_datacenters/

[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/02/mistral_ais_le_chat_can/

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/25/overinflated_ai_balloon/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/31/ai_spies_questionable_science_journals/

[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aLhmFdXuWaTDG0i7OnuiBAAAAIA&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/10/anz_bank_github_copilot/

[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/11/ai_code_tools_slow_down/

[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/26/ai_hinders_productivity/

[15] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/