Getting software from idea to production quickly has always been important, but the increase in AI-driven application deploys is about to overwhelm even the best laid golden path to production. We can feel in our bones developers are already revving apps more frequently. The 2025 DORA Report found that 95% of developers use AI and over 80% say it has made them more productive. And that is just developers.
Now imagine every employee in a company - marketing, operations, finance, HR - using agentic AI to build and deploy their own applications. Not as a one-off experiment, but iterating multiple times a week, even daily. Gartner thinks that 80% of technology products and services will be built by people outside traditional IT by 2026.
"AI adoption now improves software delivery throughput... However, it still increases delivery instability. This suggests that while teams are adapting for speed, their underlying systems have not yet evolved to safely manage AI-accelerated development." - 2025 DORA Report
The volume of software hitting your infrastructure is about to multiply in ways that make the current CI/CD pipeline look like memories from a long ago golden era. Without a platform to handle the builds, the deployments, the security scanning, the compliance checks, infrastructure becomes the bottleneck that stymies enterprise dreams of AI productivity gains and ROI. I think that is part of why, as of Spring 2026, 56% of companies report getting very little out of AI.
Without a real application platform and a supporting platform engineering team, the benefits you get from AI will be negligible. Everything will bottleneck at the deployment and runtime stage when your systems are overwhelmed by the velocity of AI apps. With a platform, that bottleneck can be eliminated.
A good platform turns the flood of AI-generated applications into a manageable flow. An AI-minded platform also adds in all those enterprise-y features like security controls, data access, and the runtime management needed to keep those apps running and performant. You know: "day two."
Without a platform, getting a new app to production means a ticket to the infrastructure team, a security review, weeks if not months of meetings. As has been the case for over a decade, a real platform replaces all of that with a self-service golden path.
When the number of people who can create software expands from your development team to your entire workforce, what a platform gives you goes from "nice to have" to "the thing that determines whether AI investment pays off or just creates more enterprise sludge."
So... unless you are lucky enough to already have it, this is a pretty good time to TryTanzu.ai.