Here comes the normies
Given as "Here comes the normies - how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps" at SREday Amsterdam 2026 on .
Salespeople, analysts and HR teams are using AI coding tools to build their own small internal apps, and there are already thousands of them inside big companies. This talk looks at what those apps actually are, what a one-person "enterprise" ends up needing - credentials, governance, data policy, audit, a token budget - and why the answer is to shift that work down onto a platform rather than say no and start a new wave of shadow IT.
Slides
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, and 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.
Further Resources
- Protect your registries for AI use, and humans too with TrueSource Spring Enterprise by Broadcom and TrueSource Trusted Artifacts.
- TryTanzu.ai - need an AI platform? Why not TryTanzu.ai for a 90 day trial?
- "Inside the Coding Agent-Powered SDLC: Adapting Your Infrastructure," Adib Saikali and Frank Denneman, VMware Explore 2026, INVB1690LV. Where the lifecycle diagram comes from, and the argument that one developer now drives three to ten agents.
- "0 Code Agents: From AGENTS.md to Running App," Nick Kuhn, VMware Explore 2026, APPB1669LV. Make the compliant path the easiest path.
- "When everyone can build: The platform behind 1000 citizen-built apps," Boyan Dimitrov, CTO of SIXT, PlatformCon 2026, 19 minutes. A thousand solutions built by non-technical colleagues in about three months, against an expectation of ten to fifteen a month.
- "Conquering the Agentic AI Journey with a Private Cloud Platform," Stephen Elliott (IDC), Prashanth Shenoy and Shobhit Bhutani (Broadcom), 24 September 2026. "Treat every agent like it's a human" at 9:58, returned to at 21:50.
- IDC White Paper, sponsored by Broadcom, On-Premises AI Infrastructure Balances Innovation and Security, doc #US52747024, December 2024. Conducted July 2024, n = 411.