Here comes the normies - how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps
Submitted to SREDay Amsterdam on . Still waiting to hear back.
Abstract
There's a new wall to break down: the wall between normie/nerd wall. AI coding tools means we're starting to see knowledge workers writing applications. Salespeople, analysts, HR teams. Not "real" programmers - regular employees using Claude or Cowork to build small internal apps that replace the Excel-and-meeting business processes that used to take a week.
BBVA reports 4,000+ active employee-built GPTs. ABN AMRO has retired 700 internal apps and is replacing them with this new shape. Air France/KLM is saving over 200,000 hours a year on bot-driven internal automation. The pattern is showing up everywhere I look.
All those apps need to run somewhere, they need to be managed, they need rapid delivery cycles and feedback loops. Sounds like DevOps!
This talk goes over the new app patterns I'm seeing emerge, the platform-engineering work nobody planned for, and what the early movers have figured out about running it all.
This is the text that went into the CFP form, kept as submitted - not a later rewrite of it. Talks get retitled and reworked between submission and stage, so what was actually delivered may differ.