I Couldn't Buy It So I Built It: Citizen Developers Building AI Applications - Nina Eisenberg and Robert Greisemer

About this session

What happens when the tool your enterprise team needs does not exist — and the person closest to the problem is not an engineer?This talk will illustrate how a non-technical lawyer used AI coding tools to build an enterprise AI application after existing vendor options could not meet the team’s needs. The broader lesson is timely for AI4’s audience: as AI coding and agentic tools mature, domain experts can move from “requesting software” to building meaningful prototypes themselves, but enterprise deployment still requires security, reliability, privacy, and operational guardrails.We will walk through the journey from a local “vibe-coded” MVP to an enterprise-ready application, including the practical controls needed to harden AI-assisted builds: authentication, RBAC, PII handling, observability, testing, and secure deployment patterns. Attendees will leave with a real-world collaboration model for pairing domain expertise with security and platform engineering so teams can move fast without creating unacceptable risk.If you are trying to understand what AI-enabled builders mean for the future of enterprise software, this talk will show what is already possible — and what it takes to make it safe.