Practical AI
You Used to Build the Tools; Now You Review What They Do
Not long ago, the big new idea was the citizen developer. Businesspeople with no programming experience are using “low-code/no-code” (LCNC) platforms to build the apps they need by moving tiles around a screen. Drag, drop, configure, done. You knew your process better than any developer ever would, so why not build the software yourself?
That worked. Then AI arrived and made the whole conversation obsolete. It really didn’t take long.
You’re Not a Programmer; You’re an Expert in Your Process
The most profound change from LCNC to AI is the fact that you simply state what you need. No moving tiles around a screen.
And you don't build workflows or list steps now. Instead, you simply describe what you want, and AI assembles everything for you. You don't draft documents now. You tell AI what you need, and it writes a first draft in seconds. You don't sort through data looking for patterns. AI surfaces them before you ask. And if you don’t like what AI gives you, you tell it so, and it makes changes. It doesn’t get intolerant or passive/aggressive with you. It just makes the changes.
The citizen developer didn't disappear. The job just changed. New tools. Less effort. Better results.
What used to be "build it yourself" is now "evaluate and approve what AI built." What used to be "write it yourself" is now "approve what AI wrote." The human in the process didn't go away. In fact, the human became a far more important element of the process.
That point has a name: the loop.
Human-in-the-loop means exactly what it says. AI does the work. A human stays in the process at a specific moment, reviewing, approving, or correcting before the output goes anywhere that matters.
One moment. Not constant supervision. Not a second job watching everything AI does. One deliberate checkpoint, placed in the right spot, and then everything upstream from it becomes background noise you don't have to think about.
Here's why that matters more than people realize.
AI doesn't make big, dramatic mistakes. It makes confident, plausible, quiet ones. A proposal with the wrong pricing. A customer email that's technically accurate but completely wrong for the situation. A summary built on data that was updated three months ago. Nothing looks broken. It just goes out wrong.
The human checkpoint catches that. Not by watching everything but by being positioned at the very moment where "AI output" becomes "your output." Before it goes to a customer. Before it goes into a decision. Before it goes anywhere, you're responsible for.
You Maintain Control of Every Handoff Point
That handoff point is where your job lives now.
Going forward, this column will map it, workflow by workflow. Each issue takes something you're already using AI to do, identifies exactly where the human checkpoint belongs, and tells you what you can stop worrying about once it's in place.
Because that's the trade. One deliberate review step. One entire category of risk you can cross off your list.
You already know your business better than any AI ever will. That's still the whole point. It’s there to fill in the details; you’re still calling the tune!
About the Author
Technologist, creator of compelling content, and senior "resultant" Howard M. Cohen has been in the information technology industry for more than four decades. He has held senior executive positions in many of the top channel partner organizations and he currently writes for and about IT and the IT channel.