HCM CITY — Việt Nam is among the markets where software developers report the strongest productivity gains from artificial intelligence (AI), according to Agoda’s AI Developer Report 2026.

The report found that 63 per cent of respondents in Việt Nam save at least seven hours a week using AI, while 43 per cent save more than 10 hours.

Developers are using AI across a broader range of tasks, including code review, architecture, debugging, learning and documentation. However, human judgement remains important: 86 per cent of Vietnamese respondents said they always or most of the time review or validate AI-generated outputs.

The findings point to the rapid adoption of AI tools by Vietnamese developers. This is in line with Resolution No. 57 on creating breakthroughs in science and technology development, innovation and digital transformation.

The report surveyed software developers across Southeast Asia and India and examined the shift from using AI assistants for individual tasks to deploying autonomous AI agents across the software-development lifecycle. It also explored how this shift is changing developers’ work, how organisations manage costs and where human accountability lies.

Across the surveyed markets, more than half of developers – 55 per cent – said they now save at least seven hours each week, up from 18 per cent in 2025. Meanwhile, 62 per cent said AI-generated code was often or almost always usable without major changes.

More than half of respondents said AI agents were already being used in selected production workflows or broadly across their organisation. However, only 38 per cent described their codebase as mostly or fully ready for a fully autonomous agent.

Cost was the most commonly cited barrier to wider adoption, at 28 per cent, followed by integration complexity at 24 per cent and a lack of governance at 19 per cent.

The report said the cost of using AI extended beyond model calls to include the work required to design, integrate, review and validate agents. Four in five respondents said they were working under some form of AI usage limit, such as token quotas, usage caps or budget restrictions.

Developers were more open to giving AI agents autonomy over lower-risk, reversible tasks, such as documentation. But human oversight increased as tasks moved closer to production: 79 per cent said they required human approval before deployment.

“Artificial intelligence is reshaping how developers across Southeast Asia and India build, learn and collaborate,” said Idan Zalzberg, chief technology officer at Agoda. “What began as a way to speed up individual tasks is becoming a broader change in how software is built.”

He said developers were seeing stronger productivity gains and beginning to use agents across more of the development lifecycle. But greater capability brought new responsibilities, he added, and organisations needed to manage costs, build safeguards and retain human judgement where it mattered most.

The study was commissioned by Agoda and conducted in partnership with Macramé Consulting from June to August 2026. It gathered responses from more than 800 employed software developers and engineering leaders in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Việt Nam. — BIZHUB/VNS