The 2025 DevSecOps research report, The Intelligent Software Development Era, revealed that DevSecOps professionals are entering an "AI paradox" era.
"This survey illustrates what we call the 'AI Paradox,' where coding is faster than ever, yet the lack of quality, security, and speed across the software lifecycle is causing friction on the road to innovation," said Manav Khurana, chief product and marketing officer at GitLab. "Toolchain fragmentation has created bottlenecks for developers, and AI agents are amplifying the issue.
AI paradox era
The study found that Singapore practitioners lose an average of 8 hours each week to inefficient processes due to a lack of knowledge sharing (34%), a lack of cross-functional communication (34%), and inadequate/unclear work processes (33%)
Over half use more than five tools for software development (62%) and use more than 5 AI tools (54%).
The majority (82%) also say that agentic AI will be most successful when implemented in a platform engineering approach.
AI is also reshaping roles, with over 80% expecting it to change their roles within the next five years significantly, and wishing their organisations invested more in helping them upskill.
As AI adoption increases, human oversight remains critical, with 88% agreeing that AI will never truly replace creativity and innovation.
Compliance challenges are also rising, and 85% of organisations predict that compliance will be built into code and automatically applied by 2027.
New framework needed
Khurana added that organisations' new frameworks need to match the speed of software development in the AI era.
He describes it as "one that provides intelligent orchestration across the entire software lifecycle while addressing the interconnected requirements of AI orchestration, governance, and compliance that individual point tools simply cannot solve."
Harris Poll conducted the research among 3,266 IT operations, security and software development professionals worldwide, including 252 from Singapore.
