“Generative AI is becoming as essential to the software development process as IDEs, testing, and DevOps automation tools. Engineers are learning the best uses of reasoning LLMs across a growing number of agentic, multi-step tasks. MCP servers extend the capabilities of development and automation tools vendors so they are now accessible by LLMs used in development.”
By the end of 2025, over 70% of software developers will use generative AI to augment development work, including code generation, completion, review, analysis, bug fixing, or unit tests. Of developers and DevOps engineers, 20% will use AI and open standards to automate tasks and basic workflows as the use of agentic AI expands to platform engineering.
Mitch Ashley is Vice President and Practice Lead, Software Lifecycle Engineering for The Futurum Group. Mitch has over 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur, industry analyst, product development and IT leader, with expertise in software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, DevSecOps, cloud, and AI. Mitch comes to The Futurum Group through the acquisition of Techstrong Group (devops.com, securityboulevard.com, and techstrong.tv), where he serves as CTO and founder of Techstrong Research.
As a Chief Technology Advisor, CTO, CIO, and head of engineering, Mitch led the creation of award-winning cybersecurity products utilized in the private and public sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and all military branches. Mitch also led managed PKI services for broadband, Wi-Fi, IoT, energy management and 5G industries, product certification test labs, an online SaaS (93m transactions annually), the development of video-on-demand and Internet cable services, and a national broadband network. He began his career creating large banking and telecom applications and building AI expert systems.
Having led his first of three introductions of DevOps in 2014 and the modernization of three IT organizations, Mitch shares his experiences as an analyst, keynote and conference speaker, panelist, host, moderator, and expert interviewer. His talks cover some of the most in-demand topics, including CIO/CTO leadership, product and software development, DevOps, DevSecOps, containerization, container orchestration, AI/ML/GenAI, platform engineering, SRE, and cybersecurity. He publishes his research on futurumgroup.com/ and TechstrongResearch.com/resources. He hosts multiple award-winning video and podcast series, including DevOps Unbound, CISO Talk, and Techstrong Gang.
The vision behind everything in Futurum’s Custom Research practice is this: research should show you what is happening, what comes next, and what to do about it. It should be personal to each audience, easy for people to grasp, and structured so LLMs can reason over it accurately. And it should be fast and turnkey; you want answers now, not another project to carry for quarters.
Whether you are defining business, channel, or go-to-market strategy; evaluating vendors or justifying ROI; or commissioning research to fill an emerging market need, we have your back, with a program that answers your questions with the objectivity and credibility to drive real decisions.
To do it, we bring unmatched data to bear: Futurum research, surveys, and market projections; validated market feeds; ETR’s 15 years of insight from 10,000 technology decision-makers; G2’s buyer and user data; and what our analysts hear every day. Add leading primary collection, from AI-moderated voice interviews to surveys and analyst-led interviews, all turnkey, and every project comes out credible, nuanced, and actionable.
And we don’t just drop the results in your lap. For internal work, we provide analyst-led sessions, interactive dashboards, and a range of formats. For market-facing work, Futurum delivers turnkey activation and amplification that actually gets seen, by people and by LLMs, through our media and share of voice. This is research that moves decisions and markets.
We will meet you wherever you are, from a fast-turn brief to a multi-year program, and shape the work to your goals, timeline, and budget. The right program for your moment.
If any of this is useful, I would love to talk.
VP, Custom Research · The Futurum Group
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