Empower business users to spin up apps with AI-assisted development

Low-code development is often overlooked as a mainstream business tool. Misconceptions about technical requirements, governance and scalability cause organizations to hesitate to put development into the hands of business users—missing the efficiency gains that follow.

But the tides are changing, and low-code development is ready for prime time.
Gartner® predicts that by 2026, developers outside of formal IT departments will account for 80 percent of the user base for low-code development tools, up from 60% in 2021, due to multitudes of citizen development, and executive-sponsored democratization initiatives with generative AI accelerating this shift.[1]

And the move is already underway, with business developers spinning up new apps with record speed, ease and reach. Let’s look at how organizations can empower business users with AI-led development, optimizing business processes to meet market and customer demands without risk.

Answering the CEOs call with confidence

The push for low-code adoption is coming from the top-down, with 67 percent of CEOs wanting more technology work done directly by business functions.[2] As a result, IT is under pressure to democratize application delivery, but worries about weak governance and security gaps remain. Gartner suggests resisting the impulse to play IT gatekeeper, as blocking low-code initiatives only hurts productivity, slows app delivery and leads employees to turn to shadow IT.

Yet, with only 24 percent of citizen developers today creating automation with low-code tools[3], how can organizations answer CEOs’ calls for widespread enterprise citizen development?

The answer: a well-governed, AI-led low-code platform to enable business developers and democratize low-code development across the organization. This is made possible by delivering on three key fronts:

1. No developer experience, no problem

According to Forrester, “Development is becoming a skill spectrum, not just a job, and enterprises must apply technology [i.e., a low-code platform] that directly enables and supports the pattern.”[4]

With an AI-led development platform, such as OpenText™ AppWorks™, business users turn into business developers in an instant, able to meet the organization’s need for basic apps. No extensive AppWorks experience required, users can generate apps to automate processes using Developer Aviator, the AI-powered development feature. Solution builders can leverage Developer Aviator by customizing ready-made templates available for standard business processes, entering simple text instructions or importing the Excel file of a process previously tracked by a spreadsheet. Users can subsequently leverage low-code tools to configure the generated apps.

2. Eliminate dependency on pro developers and IT

According to a 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, custom study, process automation/workflow development is one of the top three use cases for genAI.[5] With a low-code development platform powered by GenAI, organizations can bridge the skills gap and empower business users to generate a variety of process automation apps, augmenting and automating process app creation. Plus, by simplifying and expediting creation of basic applications, organizations can increase business agility without taxing developer resources. Solution builders can share their basic applications with professional developers to add custom code and scale solutions to meet business requirements.

3. Focus on governance

When lowering the barrier to app development, governance becomes more important than ever to avoid the sprawl of apps. Yet Forrester found that vendors often don’t inform customers of available governance features.[6]

OpenText AppWorks allows organizations to embrace low-code development with confidence, safely putting app creation in the hands of business users. We enable companies to take advantage of role-based access control to grant different levels of capability and access to different types of developers, as well as separating configurations and data by teams and department to segment who can do what and where. If needed, IT can be involved in the promotion of applications between a developer environment and the production system to allow more control over the allocation of production resources.

Plus, usage reports allow an administrator to monitor how many applications are being deployed and which users are assigned to each application, and a dedicated administration module helps manage deployed applications, disabling and deleting as desired.

Put low-code development misconceptions to rest

Bringing together governance and AI-led development allows organizations to democratize automation and app development, turning low-code into a mainstream business tool. Using GenAI to simplify and streamline app creation turns employees into confident business developers and delivers the following benefits:

• Speed: Expedite time to value

• Savings: Lower total cost of development and technical debt

• Supercharged efficiency: Generate easy-to-deploy process automation and other applications within a single, easy-to-use platform

• Agility: Increase agility by democratizing process automation development for an improved customer experience

Ready for app development to take flight across your organization?

See for yourself how AppWorks Developer Aviator delivers an intuitive and powerful user experience to make productivity and efficiency soar.

Watch the demo

1. [1] Gartner, Forecast Analysis: Low-Code Development Technologies, Worldwide, By Varsha Mehta, Fabrizio Biscotti,  Et. Al., 27 October 2022. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
2. [2] Ibid.
3. [3] Forrester, A Buyers’ Guide to Digital Process Automation, February 2024
4. [4] The Forrester Wave™: Low-Code Platforms For Citizen Developers, Q1 2024
5. [5] 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, Custom study “AI’s impact on Automation and Integration” 2023
6. [6]  Forrester, A Buyers’ Guide to Digital Process Automation, February 2024