by Esther SheinContributing writerEmpowering business users to create AI agents and apps can unleash difference-making creativity, but risks remain. Tech execs share hard-earned insights on making it work.
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Credit: Rob Schultz / Shutterstock AI fluency has long mattered to Sambit Dutta. When he joined global chemical manufacturer Hexion this year as SVP of AI transformation, his strategy included bringing “AI to the masses, where the people can not only just consume AI, but also become what we call builders.”
Dutta has made citizen AI a cornerstone of Hexion’s IT strategy because he believes that when the creativity and domain expertise of employees is centralized and funneled through a business analyst or developer, “there are always things lost in translation.” Further, “there’s a queuing process where that request ultimately gets queued, and then based on dollars and other priorities, never gets executed,” he adds.
Dutta also believes that innovation unleashed at the grassroots level is how enterprises achieve true transformation. And it facilitates change management because people become more receptive to absorbing technology at that level, he says.
“We firmly believe that we are at a stage where citizen development has finally taken off” at Hexion, Dutton says.
Citizen AI — a development strategy that has CIOs making AI tools available to employees outside IT to create their own solutions — is taking hold inside enterprises. It democratizes AI by enabling business users to solve problems and create efficiencies in their roles without the overhead of full IT-led development.
“Historically, turning a good idea into a technology solution required specialist skills, funding, and space on a development roadmap,” says Ankur Anand, group CIO at technology recruiter Harvey Nash. “AI lowers that barrier. People can explore an idea, create an agent or prototype, and establish whether it genuinely solves a business problem before the organization commits significant resources.”
But the objective isn’t to create hundreds of unofficial production systems, Anand adds. “It’s to create hundreds of experiments and make it much easier for good ideas to emerge from anywhere in the organization.”
Freedom first, governance to follow
Travel tech company eSky Group is one such company moving toward an AI-first model, “where using it is as natural as using email or a browser,” says Piotr Mynarski, technology director there.
“Employees creating their own agents is not a fringe behavior,” he says. “It is one of the clearest trends we see inside innovative companies today, and the most visible change in how our engineering works.”
At the end of 2025, eSky made AI a company objective, and by spring 2026, the company had agreements with several AI providers whose tools were opened up to everyone, not just to engineering staff.
eSky expects about 60% of its more than 650 employees worldwide outside the contact center to become fluent with AI. Regular use of AI is climbing toward 80%, Mynarski says, who notes that the company’s approach was a bit unusual: Company officials “barely capped budgets, let people use the tools for personal purposes, too, and gave everyone room to experiment rather than mandating a narrow toolset,” he says.
That approach deliberately gave employees freedom first, with governance to follow once leaders saw what they actually built.
“That order was a conscious bet and so far, the right one,” Mynarski says. “Today, we have over 30 agents across the company, almost every engineering team works with at least one, and several teams have more, with some already running in production.”
The agents were developed from a shared codebase built by eSky engineers, and they specialize in different needs: development of new products and features, maintenance, analytics, and monitoring business metrics.
“The rules are catching up rather than leading,” Mynarski notes. “Every agent has its own identity and credentials, guardrails and observability are standard, and responsibility for an agent sits with the team that runs it, not with a central AI department.”
AI reduces the barrier to entry — but still requires guardrails
Before joining Hexion, Dutta worked at Nestlé, where he implemented “a pretty robust program around digital fluency.” Parts of the program worked, but some didn’t, particularly where sophistication was required “in thinking, and a little bit of a technical depth.”
Some citizen development can be performed with drag-and-drop tools, but often written instructions are required, he notes. “A lot of people get really scared when you introduce those kinds of concepts to them.” That creates a barrier when employees want to leverage citizen development in areas such as data science, real-time automation, and Microsoft Power Apps, Dutta points out.
“Those are one type of automation that requires a little bit more sophistication,” he says. But that has changed. “The biggest unlock is now with prompt. You can avoid going into the developer tool altogether. … You can simply go in the prompt and describe what you want,and accordingly, the backend generates the application for it.”
As a result, Power Apps, which was more challenging for users to master and scale, no longer requires business users “to know the nuances about how to create a Power app.” Dutta says, unlocking a new level of productivity to a broader range of users.
At Hexion, employees use a centralized IT-owned platform to create agents. Business users have several tool options, “but those options are restricted to what we believe are enterprise-grade tools, and we have to secure it,” Dutta says.
For example, whereas everyone in the company can use Power App Vibe, only some employees have access to AI building platform Replit for coding.
Replit is “a little bit of a clamped-down application because we want to control what goes into production and how it connects with enterprise databases,” Dutta explains. “Replit can be dangerous because it if it is connected to SAP and other critical systems in a way that the users are doing something unusual with their app, it may bring down the system altogether.”
Users can, however, immediately connect the Replit applications they create to a data lake or other repositories, he adds. “It’s only when a transactional system gets impacted that we impose some condition.”
Unlocking business-user creativity
Hexion’s citizen AI strategy is unleashing creativity across the company, Dutta says. For example, the leader for environmental health and safety built an app she calls Wingman that can be used in the company’s factories to run health and safety processes. “We did some light editing on the core to make it a little bit enterprise standard,” and then it was deployed, Dutta says.
Given the divide between vibe-coded apps and production systems, governance remains an essential ingredient of any citizen AI development strategy. One of the AI governance tools Hexion uses is Microsoft Agent 365, which Dutta says lets IT see which agent is running and the various statuses of agents that employees deploy.
“We can start and stop anything we want across the enterprise,” he says. “It’s one single-pane governance layer.”
At eSky, employees are automating their daily work and building small applications for reporting and for automating specific business cases, Mynarski says. They also lean heavily on specialized agents that can take over parts of a job for them, he says.
In one instance, a performance marketing specialist built an agent that reads campaign data across eSky’s markets and is starting to generate ad content. The operations team runs a platform of 16 scheduled automations and small apps for controlling, reconciliation, and refunds, built by the people who used to do that work by hand, he says.
However, “this often becomes a problem the moment a personal tool needs to become a production system,” Mynarski says. “We have that covered with practices and guardrails that these teams can plug into, so the initiative stays with them and the hardening comes from us.”
At Harvey Nash, a content manager has created an agent that helps the company’s recruitment consultants find approved posts and assets, personalize it to their role, and post them to their social channels.
“This supports us with brand amplification and helping position them as market experts without requiring them to create new content,” Anand says. “We can measure the number of posts created, adding a gamification element to it to encourage usage.”
Coding isn’t the most important capability needed to become an AI citizen, he notes. “It’s understanding a problem well enough to describe it, knowing the context and data behind it, and having the judgment to recognize whether the result is useful.”
Overall, citizen AI is about dramatically increasing the number of experiments an organization can undertake, Anand says. “Give people the freedom and guardrails to turn ideas into proof points,” he says. “When an idea demonstrates real value, that’s when technology steps in to make it enterprise-ready and scale it. You get grassroots innovation without creating a technology Wild West.”
For CIOs considering launching a citizen AI strategy, Mynarski advises keeping costs in mind. “You have to ask, more than ever before, whether a given use brings value to the organization, because it is very easy to spin up AI that works beautifully and adds nothing,” he says.
Still, Mynarski believes the issue CIOs face is not employees doing too much with AI without permission. “The challenge is teams doing too little,” he says. “My advice to other CIOs: Talk about security in the same breath as innovation. If you let that gap grow, the freedom you gave people will be taken away from them later, and that is the expensive scenario.”
See also:
- How IT leaders can make vibe coding work at enterprise scale
- Your employees are building AI agents. Do you know what they’re doing?
- How to make sense of the agentic AI tools ecosystem
- What world-class IT looks like in the gen AI era
- How AI agents are shaping the future of work
- AI governance is fast becoming an unmanageable chore
by Esther Shein Contributing writerEsther Shein is a journalist with extensive experience writing and editing for both print and the web with a focus on business and technology as well as education and general interest features. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of the online technology magazine Datamation, managing editor of BYTE, and a senior writer at eWeek (formerly PC Week). Earlier in her career, she was a stringer for The Associated Press. Her work has appeared in TechRepublic, Tech Target, Information Week, and Computerworld, among other outlets. She holds a B.S. in broadcast journalism from Boston University.
Esther won a 2025 AZBEE award for her state of the industry coverage.
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