AI made software easy to build. Running it is the hard part
Executive Take
Every shadow-built AI app that impresses an executive committee is a future support ticket with no clear owner, and the fix isn't a governance gate but a habit: ask what problem it solves before asking who approved it. CIOs who wait for a failure or an audit to discover these applications will inherit the operational debt at the worst possible moment.
Executive Summary
A CIO.com opinion piece argues AI has made building applications fast and easy citizen developers now ship working apps without IT but running them in production requires operations discipline AI hasn't democratised. The author cites the 2025 DORA report and Gartner's analysis of enterprise AI coding agents to frame a growing "operational debt" risk as prototypes get promoted to business-critical services without ownership models.
Why It Matters
Technology and enterprise leaders now face a wave of business-built AI applications graduating from department experiments to enterprise expectations overnight, with no built-in plan for security, support, or lifecycle management. HR and business leaders driving citizen-development initiatives should recognize they're also creating unbudgeted long-term obligations for IT.