Artificial Intelligence

You Can Just Do Things

AuthorShaun Davis

AI has collapsed the distance between idea and application. The teams that win will enable creation, not block it.

The friction in creating apps has dropped to close to zero. This is a great factoid, but what does it actually mean?

When “Data to the People” Changed the Design Loop

Let’s climb into the wayback machine, back to the 2010s. Tools like Tableau were bursting onto the scene and making bold promises like, “Data to the people.” It was a Cambrian Explosion of people gaining access to their data and being able to just do things with it. They were creating dashboards, infographics, and myriad analyses, digging into their data. No longer did they have to send a request to some far away team to create a report for them and then give them the permission to run it and export to CSV. People could connect directly to their data and start building.

What really changed was the tightening of the design loop.

The Old World: Requirements, Waiting, and Compromise

In most companies, the process still looks like this: you have an idea for an application or automation, you turn that idea into requirements, and then it disappears into a queue. Someone else reads the requirements and makes a series of value judgments about what they have the time, effort, or interest to build. Eventually something comes back. Maybe it solves the problem. Maybe it solves part of it. Maybe the moment has already passed. If it doesn’t quite work, the cycle starts again, new requirements, new prioritization, new waiting. In the modern enterprise, building an app can take weeks, months, sometimes even years, even when the person closest to the problem already knows exactly what the solution should look like.

AI Collapses the Feedback Loop

AI changes all of that.

It once again tightens the feedback loop to enable the customer to create exactly what they want. No more convincing someone that your idea is valid, that your proximity to the problem is the most instructive for how to design the solution. You can just… do things.

The Best Tableau App I’ve Ever Seen

I recently met with a friend who showed me an app he had AI create for him. It was the single best solution I’d seen to solve a niche but high-friction problem in Tableau. The UI was great. The flow was intuitive. It solved a problem for him, but also for a bunch of other people. When they saw his solution, they were just as excited as I was.

This guy isn’t a developer, he’s a PM. But his app works exactly for the intended audience.

The New Reality: Users Build the Tools They Need

This is the stage we’ve entered. The users can create exactly what they need, in the way they need it. You can just… do things.

So where does this leave your expensive bullpen of full-stack developers? They’re enablers. They are platform builders. They are reviewers. The teams that will win are those that enable users to create beautiful, safe, resilient apps that fit into an overall system.

Enable the Builders or Become the Roadblock

The teams that lose are the ones who invest in roadblocks. The teams who cut off access to object storage, compute, and hosting. These teams will find themselves out of a job. The wave of creation and innovation is too large for them to oppose.