Here comes the normies
Given as "Here comes the normies - how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps" at DevOpsDays Prague 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
Agentic AI tools are creating a new workload nobody's ready for: knowledge workers creating their own applications. Salespeople, analysts, HR teams. Not "real" programmers - regular employees using Claude or Cowork to build small internal apps to replace Excel-and-PowerPoint driven business "processes."
For example: 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. This is spreading fast!
These new apps still need everything the old ones did - auth, audit, secure supply chain, access to enterprise data, somewhere to actually run and scale. IT can't say no, or they'll be left out of the loop in a new shadow IT wave.
This talk goes over what's actually happening: the new app patterns I'm seeing emerge across banks, automakers, and airlines, the platform-engineering work nobody planned for, and what the early movers have figured out about running it all.
Further Resources
- 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.