Digital.ai this week made generally available a Denali update to its DevSecOps platform that promises to make it simpler to integrate custom artificial intelligence (AI) models with the AI models developed by the company.

At the same time, the company is adding self-guided workflows and templates to generate tests and implement DevSecOps best practices along with integrations with Terraform by Hashicorp, Azure Bicep, Azure Key Vault and AWS Secrets Manager.

Finally, Digital.ai is adding an ARM Protection feature to better secure iOS applications without requiring embedded bitcode or integrations into the build system. DevOps teams can, via a single command, protect compiled applications locally with support for obfuscation, run-time active protections and application monitoring without uploading them to a third-party service.

Greg Ellis, general manager for application security for Digital.ai, said the overall goal is to make it simpler for software engineering teams to invoke capabilities that have been embedded within the company’s DevSecOps platform.

In the case of AI models, that also means instead of requiring DevOps teams to only use AI models developed by Digital.ai, the company is moving to make it simpler for DevOps teams that adopt its platform to incorporate custom AI models as they see fit as part of an ongoing effort to democratize intelligence at scale, he noted.

In general, it’s already apparent organizations will be employing heterogeneous approaches to incorporating AI models into DevOps workflows, said Ellis. The challenge now is moving beyond experimenting with AI to embedding them within DevOps workflows, he added.

It’s already clear developers are using generative AI to develop code at increasingly faster rates. The challenge now is to manage that accelerated pace of development when many organizations are already struggling to manage existing DevOps workflows at scale. Hopefully, AI technologies will also one day help software engineers find ways to manage that volume of code moving across their DevOps pipelines.

In the meantime, organizations will also need to better define where the machine learning operations (MLOps) workflows that data scientists use to build AI models end and where DevOps workflows that will be used to embed AI models into applications begin. As is often the case when it comes to emerging technologies, cultural issues are just as challenging as the implementation hurdles that need to be overcome.

At this point, like it or not, the generative AI genie is out of the proverbial bottle. Just about every job function imaginable will be impacted to varying degrees. In the case of DevOps teams, the ultimate impact should involve less drudgery as many of the manual tasks that conspire to make managing DevOps workflows tedious are eliminated. Less clear is to what degree AI may drive organizations that have already embraced DevOps to adopt an alternative platform, but savvy DevOps teams are, at the very least, starting to map out which processes are about to be automated so they can have more time to focus on issues that add more value to the business.