Low-code was slowly democratizing non-IT personnel to become ‘citizen developers’ when GenAI coding came along. What transformative app-development trends lay ahead?
With generative AI chatbots able to churn out clean code for people with the right prompting skills, how will low-code application development remain relevant?
According to Gartner analysts’ predictions, by 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will be using AI coding assistants, up from less than 10% in early 2023.
“With the built-in guardrails of low-code platforms, teams can experiment and innovate freely without the privacy and security concerns associated with public AI models,” Azevedo said. “These technologies will free up developers’ time, reduce repetitive tasks, and alleviate burnout, allowing them to focus on the long-term projects that deliver the most business value.”
Four trends to gauge low-code’s future
At least for now, developers can expect to combine the power of low-code and generative AI to build, test, and update applications at an unprecedented speed. Organizations will need to invest in upskilling and reskilling programs to ensure developers are able to adjust to new AI tools in their workflows.
The next three trends are:
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Front-facing functions will be the earliest to benefit from the GenAI/low-code integration. Developer roles serving front-office personnel such as customer service agents or sales representatives will be creating applications with embedded GenAI features to help streamline processes, anticipate needs, and empower agents to deliver smarter, more personalized interactions with improved resolution times.
Meanwhile, Azevedo also expects supporting roles, such as HR, to increasingly deploy GenAI chatbots, enabling personnel to quickly and independently find the resources they need via self-service.
With developers in the frontlines able to quickly churn out AI-powered applications to streamline the onboarding and recruitment processes, HR teams will be able to free up more time to focus on the types of employee engagement that matter most.
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Cloud and customer experience trends will impact CIOs’ role to prioritize efficiency and growth as they face tighter budgets and a talent shortage. In 2024, mid-size businesses will increasingly prioritize cloud-native benefits and customer experience (CX) expectations via infrastructure and application development.
Said Azevedo: “More and more customers will expect a personalized experience at every step of their journey, including customer onboarding, self-service, and e-commerce. Cloud-native development enables organizations to rapidly and securely bring ideas on how to improve the customer experience to fruition.”
How CIOs manage to optimize cloud computing benefits and meet CX trends will be a function of how well they can generate good applications with GenAI/low-code quickly with minimal bugs or business logic errors.
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Communication barriers between developers and business leaders will also be an impactful trend on how GenAI and low-code pathways will develop, integrate require ratification.
Traditionally, developers have been building applications with long lines of code written in languages that those outside of their department did not understand or struggled to integrate into their work.
This barrier has led to developers experiencing difficulties in sharing ideas across their organization. However, with low-code (and GenAI’s versatile repertory of programming languages), this communication barrier will hopefully be reduced.
Azevedo concluded: “Low-code platforms showcase code in a visual and straightforward manner, so software teams can easily demo their work. This will create better collaboration and alignment on goals across the organization’s business and tech teams in 2024.”
As the interplay of the four trends above continues to shape how developer communities (and/or citizen programmers) will use balance GenAI coding (a developing field fraught with potential long-term data privacy and other concerns) with low-code processes or vice versa, the field of application development is set to undergo radical change ahead.
