Business-minded developers - The asset your business needs

There’s a fundamental shift taking place in the role of developers — today, they are responsible for the entire lifecycle of an application development process. This is evident across the board, with 62% of developers influencing purchasing decisions, and almost a third actually choosing their own tools independently.  

As companies continue to adopt AI into the very core of their operations, both the business and technology sides of organisations must work ever closer together to drive change. Business users are becoming more closely involved in wanting to leverage technology to interact with their data in natural language and derive faster insights.  This, in turn, is giving rise to the notion of ‘citizen developers’ — technically inclined people on the business side, who are also growing in importance, forging the business-technology link even further.  

Developers have the vision to solve cross-functional problems and deliver scalable, governed solutions to business problems and objectives, building apps and technology that help organisations innovate and deliver for their customers. On top of this, developers are regularly required to adapt to new challenges and a rapidly evolving technological landscape, especially in the age of AI, ensuring that the technology continues to deliver for the company. 

In this environment, developers who can understand both the technical side and how to deliver commercial value are becoming indispensable assets. Citizen developers should only aid this, easing the load for their traditional counterparts. But as this community evolves, those seeking engagement with it must evolve too. 

The changing dev toolbox - Open Source & AI

One of the catalysts for this change is open source. As a key foundation for developers, open source fosters faster innovation by offering IP-free source and collaboration tools. Open source’s vibrant community also provides a crucial way for developers to learn, share knowledge, and solve problems together. 

Despite recent chatter about AI diminishing roles, data expertise will, in fact, become more critical than ever. It is imperative to follow the Applied Creativity method, wherein we must shift our mindset from the fear that "AI will take my job" to the empowering belief that "I can use AI to excel at my job." AI is not a replacement but a powerful tool, much like calculators never replaced mathematicians, enhancing human capability rather than threatening it. For data professionals, AI will automate the most laborious parts of their work, freeing them to acquire new skills and focus on more strategic, proactive work—making them significantly more valuable to their teams and their jobs far more enjoyable. This positions AI as another crucial addition to our professional toolkit, allowing human creativity and unique perspectives to remain the enduring advantage.

However, AI must, of course, be used with the appropriate guardrails. Overseeing the end-to-end workflow from data sources to the end-user is crucial for avoiding issues around governance and security. So, while there are positives, there is also caution; business leaders must remain close to this transformation.

The rise of the citizen developer

Given the pace and demands of change, businesses are looking beyond traditional dev roles and empowering a new class of creators. Citizen developers combine a ‘can-do’ attitude with enough technical aptitude to master low-code and no-code solutions coupled with AI-powered coding tools. This is changing how organisations approach problems, with business leaders able to accelerate innovation independently, especially regarding departmental or domain-specific needs. Today, every individual is interacting with AI in their day-to-day lives making even non-technical users to easily code and build applications. 

While citizen developers can share the burden of work often handled by their conventional counterparts, they also introduce new challenges. Tech platforms and IT teams must ensure that resources and support are available to ensure high software quality and performance. 

DevRel strategies must rapidly adapt to focus on professional developers—who focus on secure infrastructure—and the growing number of AI-literate citizen developers. This function needs to be fluid, offering advanced support for experts while providing essential templates, training, and guardrails for citizen developers. By enabling both groups to collaborate safely in a unified environment, DevRel strengthens relationships, ensures valuable developer feedback (especially from citizen builders/users), and directly fuels future innovation.

Strategic enablers of the future

The combination of open source approaches, AI tools, and the democratisation of development is a potent trifecta. But in the long term, it is most certainly the collaboration between developers and citizen developers that will help businesses meet their goals in the fast-changing tech landscape we are seeing today.

The rise of Agentic AI presents both a significant opportunity and a new challenge for developers. While AI agents are crucial for orchestrating multiple tools and systems—allowing developers to leverage diverse data for comprehensive responses—this new workflow demands specialised skills. Developers must now focus on wiring, orchestrating, and managing these various agents within the AI platform. This complexity means that skilling and continuous learning on how to effectively work with and govern these agents are essential. Mastering the Agentic workflow will not only empower professional developers but also enable citizen developers to derive actionable insights, ultimately maximising the value extracted from the AI platform.

Today, traditional developers face a vastly different landscape, and citizen developers are there to complement this, not create more difficulty. Developers bring great technical skills, while citizen peers bring speed and business context. If companies can successfully unite these two strengths, they’ll be able to reduce IT backlogs, fix talent shortages, and accelerate business success. 

Kamesh Sampath

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Kamesh Sampath is Lead Developer Advocate, India at Snowflake