Enlisting Citizen Developers to Deliver Digital Business Value With Generative AI & Low-Code Development Platforms

Enterprise IT organizations face a chronic undersupply of trained programming professionals leading to an application supply-demand disequilibrium. To address this unmet need, Generative AI (GenAI) and Low-Code Development Platforms (LCDP) are maturing and making application development by non-professional programmers a viable possibility. Using GenAI and LCDPs, “Citizen Developers” can rapidly develop and deploy applications to deliver business functionality using IT-sanctioned platforms. However, several issues need to be considered before Citizen Developers can safely produce usable applications. GenAI as an application development platform is a recent phenomenon with limited experiential data as to its viability: therefore, our paper presents a case study of the five-year journey that one enterprise took to implement a LCDP, recounting the successes and challenges in adopting the platform.