Citizen Developers: Empowering organisations through AI democratisation to achieve more business value

For AI to fulfil its promise as the key to enhancing business value, companies must invest time in developing a thorough foundation of capabilities including having the right culture encouraging ideation and a federated approach to business-driven data governance. While some enterprise IT and operations personnel are already benefiting from early AI deployments in the form of enhanced productivity and efficiency, better customer experiences, and cheaper costs, a greater and more transformational use of AI can still be achieved. To do this, organisations are beginning to democratise the use of AI, enabling non-IT team members to securely utilise and capitalise on the technology by harmonising AI projects with business goals and cross-functional teams in order to develop more innovative use cases.

That AI democratisation is gaining popularity can be seen from a recent Celigo study which reported 68% of IT/Ops leaders are in favour of automating front- and back-office tasks using a "citizen developer" mentality. Additionally, business customers can be less dependent on IT help with 53% of IT teams allowing them to autonomously apply AI solutions. Furthermore, by giving them the freedom to apply AI solutions, they can directly address certain operational problems, thereby promoting quicker innovation and more specialised solutions. Offering this level of freedom shows great trust, but it shouldn’t be done without first putting in place safeguards that ensure citizen developers are implementing AI applications while adhering to internal IT guidelines and strategy.

Embracing a citizen developer mindset

The term "citizen developer" describes the democratic transformation of technology where non-technical employees use low-code or no-code platforms to build applications and streamline business processes. For example, a finance manager at a retail business who wishes to automate the process of balancing daily sales data from several e-commerce platforms with the business's accounting software.

Advantages of a citizen developer strategy

Having a citizen developer strategy has many advantages, and of those, time efficiency is often the most evident. Why? Because AI is being used by citizen developers to automate the repetitive and time-consuming processes that cause inefficient workflows. Teams are relying on it to automate operations, including inventory management, data entry, and customer support interactions. It’s these types of automation that result in more dependable and consistent operations because they lower the possibility of human error while simultaneously increasing productivity.

Another advantage comes in AI’s ability to rapidly process and analyse huge data groups. In doing so it gives business teams access to sophisticated data analytics projects, previously handled by data specialists to aid in decision-making. For the first time, operations outside of IT can start analysing massive data sets on their own, revealing patterns and insights that will help them depend less on other business functions.

Ensuring AI is baked into your operations

The core idea of integrating AI into back-end operations is to streamline workflows and reduce the technical burden on citizen integrators, shifting the focus from merely promoting an innovative learning culture to actually living it. By employing AI for automated error management, organisations can detect and categorise errors in real-time, suggest fixes, and learn from past incidents to prevent future occurrences. Additionally, AI can optimise processes by identifying bottlenecks, automating routine tasks, and adapting to changing workloads. This approach empowers citizen developers by reducing technical complexity through intuitive interfaces and AI-powered assistants, enhancing decision-making with real-time insights and predictive analytics, and ensuring automated compliance and security measures. Ultimately, this vision allows technology to handle the heavy lifting, enabling citizen developers to focus on strategic decisions and creative problem-solving, leading to more efficient, scalable, and innovative integration solutions.

Closing the IT gap In order to bridge the IT divide through empowerment and ensure the success of citizen developers, it is imperative to prioritise continuous education and skill development. Even if the fundamental idea behind citizen developers is that they don't require the technical expertise of an IT specialist, companies still need to spend money on training programs to provide employees a foundational understanding of AI solutions.

We've discussed the advantages reduced workloads provide IT teams, but what we haven't mentioned is the advantages it presents for wider business teams. By collaborating closely, non-IT leaders learn more about the IT function and the opportunities and constraints that are a regular part of the development process. Brought together, both teams can learn to better understand one another and generate solutions closely aligned with the organisation's larger goals and at record speed. In the end, citizen developers can produce better business outcomes than ever before, and largely because they have greater cross-function context.

A culture of agility and continuous improvement is fostered by the democratisation of technology, which invites a larger segment of the workforce to participate in digital transformation initiatives. As a result, a company may become more competitive and be better able to adapt to shifting consumer needs and technology breakthroughs. By bridging the IT divide through AI democratisation, non-technical people feel more empowered, businesses experience increased efficiencies, innovation is stimulated, and any new technology solutions generated are better adapted to the evolving demands of the entire organisation. A win for all.