Here comes the normies - how DevOps can handle the flood of AI slop-apps

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, ABN AMRO has retired 700 internal apps and is replacing them with this new shape, 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.

Speaker

michael-cote

Michael Coté


Michael Coté studies how large organizations improve how they build software to run and grow their business. His books Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation, and The Business Bottleneck cover ...