AI coding tools are radically changing the way software gets built. Developers can generate code, add libraries, refactor components, and accelerate delivery faster than ever before. For business leaders, that means greater productivity, shorter timelines, and faster innovation. But as Boncode’s Chief Commercial Officer, Harm Garvelink, points out, greater speed demands clearer visibility.
The hidden risks of AI-assisted development
Faster software delivery is valuable, but only if organizations retain visibility into what they are actually shipping. As Harm points out, “AI can help produce software faster, but it does not automatically mean that software is secure, maintainable, compliant, or traceable.”
While AI improves productivity, it can make software supply chains harder to oversee. Teams can easily adopt AI-recommended packages, frameworks, or implementation patterns without fully understanding where they come from, whether they are secure, or what licensing obligations they introduce. The risk runs beyond AI-generated code itself.
AI may unknowingly introduce other vulnerabilities, including:
- outdated libraries
- vulnerable dependencies
- unsupported software
- third-party components with compliance risks.
For that reason, when developers accept AI suggestions, organizations need a way to verify what has been introduced into the codebase. Executives, product owners, and technology leaders face a growing governance problem.
What does an SBOM provide?
A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) acts like an ingredients list for your software. It’s a structured inventory of components, dependencies, and third-party libraries used inside a system. In practice, an SBOM gives organizations a clearer understanding of what their software contains, including open-source and external dependencies that may otherwise go unnoticed.
This visibility matters for far more than cybersecurity. While an SBOM can help identify vulnerable components, it can also support maintainability by highlighting outdated dependencies, improve compliance through license visibility, and strengthen procurement or mergers and acquisitions due diligence by revealing reliance on external software.
Read our blog to learn more about a Software Bill of Materials
Why does AI make an SBOM even more important?
AI-assisted development increases the speed at which software changes and the speed at which risk can be introduced. Harm believes this changes the balance between development velocity and manual oversight. As teams build faster, human review struggles to keep pace with the volume of suggested dependencies and code changes. The answer is not to slow down innovation but to improve transparency.
For organizations adopting AI-assisted software development, an SBOM becomes more than a technical artifact. It becomes a governance tool, helping leaders understand what sits inside their software, identify risk earlier, and make better-informed decisions with confidence.
As AI becomes embedded in development workflows, trust in software will increasingly depend on visibility into what is actually being delivered. Get the visibility you need with Boncode.
