Software developers across Southeast Asia and India are rapidly transitioning from using AI assistants for individual tasks to deploying autonomous AI agents across the software-development lifecycle, according to a report from digital travel platform Agoda.
This is based on a study commissioned by Agoda and conducted in partnership with Macramé Consulting, which surveyed over 800 software developers and engineering leaders across India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Findings are supplemented by a separate executive questionnaire completed by engineering leaders across the region, and by case studies developed in direct collaboration with participating companies.
Results show that developers are experiencing greater productivity gains from AI. More than half (55%) now save at least seven hours each week, compared with 18% in 2025.
Reported code usability has also improved, with 62% saying AI-generated code is usable often or almost always without major changes.
AI is also being used more broadly across development work, including code review, architecture, debugging, learning, and documentation.
Yet human judgment remains essential as 86% of respondents still review or validate AI-generated outputs always or most of the time.
Also, more than half (53%) of respondents say AI agents are already used in selected production workflows or broadly across their organization. However, only 38% describe their codebase as mostly or fully ready for a fully autonomous agent.
Cost is the primary barrier to wider adoption, cited by 28% of respondents, ahead of integration complexity (24%) and lack of governance (19%).
The report finds that AI costs extend beyond model calls to include the work needed to design, integrate, review, and validate agents.
Four in every five respondents said they are currently working under some degree of AI usage limits, such as token quotas, usage caps, or budget restrictions.
Further, developers are open to granting AI agents more autonomy for lower-risk, reversible work such as documentation. But as work moves closer to production, the demand for human oversight rises: 79% report requiring human approval for production deployment.
AI is also changing the developer’s role. System architecture and design, AI literacy, and agent orchestration are emerging as future skills.
The transition is uneven, however: 49% of junior developers report feeling less secure about their future career prospects, compared with 17% of CTO and VP Engineering respondents.
Idan Zalzberg, CTO at Agoda, said that AI is reshaping how developers across Southeast Asia and India build, learn, and collaborate.
Zalzberg said that what began as a way to speed up individual tasks is becoming a broader change in how software is built.
“Across industries, developers are seeing stronger productivity gains and are beginning to use agents across more of the development lifecycle. But greater capability brings new responsibilities,” he said.
“The real cost is not simply the model call. It is the work required to make AI trustworthy in production,” he added. “The organizations that will excel in this next phase will be the ones that manage cost carefully, build the right safeguards, and keep human judgment where it matters most.”