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Essentials of GitHub Copilot

Ryan Salva
Ryan Salva // VP of Product // GitHub

In this learning pathway module, we’ll cover the most common questions about GitHub Copilot, and we’ll hear from engineering leaders at the top organizations about how they use GitHub Copilot to accelerate the pace of software development and deliver more value to their customers.

Essentials module overview

Guide 1: What GitHub Copilot can do for your organization 

Accelerate your digital transformation while improving your organization’s code quality. With GitHub Copilot, you can attract and retain developers, boost their speed and efficiency, and make their code better and more secure.

Guide 2: Establishing trust in using GitHub Copilot 

Get answers to the most commonly asked questions and considerations raised by organizations assessing GitHub Copilot. From technical safeguards to contractual protections, we outline the approach that GitHub takes to prevent infringement risk.

Guide 3: Understanding the GitHub Copilot data pipeline 

Follow data as it goes from developer to GitHub Copilot and back again, learning how GitHub Copilot securely handles data to gather context, build prompts, filter out an assortment of unwanted results, and return high-quality code suggestions and responses.

Guide 4: Measuring the impact of GitHub Copilot 

Assess GitHub Copilot’s benefits on your business by exploring adoption and usage metrics, surveying your developers, and uncovering downstream impact.

Guide 5: Empower developers with AI Policy and Governance 

Boost productivity and empower developers to innovate faster by developing internal policies that guide acceptable use of AI tooling.

Guide 6: Tips for a successful rollout of GitHub Copilot 

Realize GitHub Copilot’s benefits quicker with developer trainings, self-service licensing, reminders, and more.

Guide 7: GitHub Copilot seat management and provisioning 

Ensure that the right users have access to GitHub Copilot while allocating seats efficiently.

Guide 8: Understanding billing for GitHub Copilot

Find answers to common questions about GitHub Copilot’s seat-based billing model, how seats are assigned, and how the billing cycle works.

Start the GitHub Copilot Learning Pathway


What is GitHub Copilot?

GitHub Copilot can transform the developer experience by providing contextualized assistance throughout the software development lifecycle, from code completions and chat assistance in the code editor to code explanations and docs queries on GitHub.com. 

GitHub Copilot Individual is designed for individual developers, freelancers, students, educators, and open source maintainers. GitHub Copilot Business and GitHub Copilot Enterprise are designed for organizations and enterprises. All offerings include code completion and chat assistance, but they differ in terms of license management, policy management, and IP indemnity, as well as how data may be used or collected.

  • GitHub Copilot Individual features GitHub Copilot in the coding environment—that is, the code editor and command line.

  • GitHub Copilot Business includes all the features of GitHub Copilot Individual, adding on organizational license management, policy management, and IP indemnity. In early-2024, both will include GitHub Copilot in GitHub Mobile. 

  • GitHub Copilot Enterprise integrates GitHub Copilot into GitHub.com as a chat interface to allow developers to converse about their codebase, and as action buttons throughout the platform, adding an additional layer of personalization by indexing your codebase to get a deeper understanding and create more tailored suggestions. Soon, it will be able to fine-tune custom, private models for code completion.

Get started with GitHub Copilot

Industry expert insight from:

ASOS: ASOS is a destination for fashion loving 20-somethings, with more than 23M active customers in over 200 countries worldwide. Through its leading web and app experiences, customers can shop from close to 900 partner brands and ASOS’s selection of fashion-led own-brand labels. ASOS shares their self-serve approach to GitHub Copilot, which empowers engineers to take advantage of its features with minimal toil.

CARIAD, a Volkswagen Group company: CARIAD is building software to make automotive mobility safer, more sustainable, and more comfortable in a new way. They use GitHub Copilot to boost productivity, streamline development processes, enhance code quality, and accelerate project timelines. This module will explore how CARIAD integrates GitHub Copilot into their daily workflows, ensuring a seamless and efficient development experience.

Cisco: Cisco enables people to make powerful connections—whether in business, education, philanthropy, or creativity. Cisco hardware, software, and service offerings are used to create the Internet solutions that make networks possible—providing easy access to information anywhere, at any time. Cisco shares best practices on how to successfully roll-out GitHub Copilot to an enterprise operating at tremendous scale.

Lyft: Lyft improves people’s lives with the world’s best transportation, and is available to approximately 95 percent of the United States population as well as select cities in Canada. Lyft is committed to effecting positive change by offsetting carbon emissions from all rides, and by promoting transportation equity through shared rides, bikeshare systems, electric scooters, and public transit partnerships. Lyft explains how tools like GitHub Copilot Chat turned AI skeptics into believers, and yielded some of the highest developer happiness scores its developer organization has seen.

Philips: Philips continuously innovate to improve people's lives through healthcare technology, consumer electronics, and smart home products. They have more than 6,000 software professionals around the world collaborating on leading technologies. Philips describes how their AI policy ensures the code their developers produce with GitHub Copilot meets their strict quality standards.

Redfin: Redfin is a technology-powered real estate company. They tap the power of GitHub Copilot to build their platform that helps people find places to live with brokerage, rentals, lending, title insurance, and renovations services. During its adoption of GitHub Copilot, Redfin calculated that the return on investment of Copilot equates to just 6 minutes of a developer’s time.

Shopify: Shopify is a provider of essential internet infrastructure for commerce. Shopify makes commerce better for everyone with a platform and services that are engineered for reliability, while delivering a better shopping experience for consumers everywhere. Shopify shares how their engineering leaders strategically evangelized GitHub Copilot adoption internally to achieve a 90%+ adoption rate with more than 24,000 lines of code accepted everyday.