Citizen Devs: Everyone is an engineer now

Citizen developers—employees outside formal IT departments who build software tools to solve immediate business problems—are increasingly common across organizations, from sales teams using AI coding assistants to operations managers automating spreadsheets. This phenomenon, which predates AI and has grown significantly (with 41% of employees creating tech capabilities outside IT in 2021), represents both a security risk and a signal that centralized engineering teams cannot meet business demands fast enough. Rather than purely a compliance issue, the rise of citizen developers reflects a blurring boundary between professional and non-professional developers, as anyone stepping outside their expertise to solve problems becomes an engineer.