Employees outpace firms on AI app building, survey finds

Pave has published a survey on employee-built AI applications in US workplaces, suggesting staff are creating work apps faster than many organisations can support them.

The study covered more than 5,500 employees and business leaders across sectors including technology, healthcare and construction. It found that 38% of employees had used AI to build an app or working prototype in the past year, while 24% had built one they use for work.

Among those who had built apps, 81% had created at least two and 38% had built four or more. The results suggest repeated app creation by staff rather than one-off experimentation.

Employee demand

Most of the activity appears to be driven by employees themselves. Nearly two-thirds of builders, 64%, said their main reason was saving time or reducing manual work. By contrast, only nine of 1,970 said they built an app because a manager or colleague asked them to.

The report found that 84% of these applications were aimed at processes previously handled through spreadsheets, email, chat or paper. This suggests workers are using AI tools to replace routine administrative tasks rather than build entirely new systems.

App creation was not confined to specialist technical teams. Among employees outside IT, software engineering and cybersecurity, 22% had built an app they use for work. Managers and supervisors were more likely to do so than individual contributors and team leads without direct reports, at 29% compared with 17%.

Leadership support

Business leaders surveyed showed broad support for the trend. Among those who had discovered an employee-built app, 83% described it as important or essential to the process it supported, and fewer than 2% had required staff to stop using such tools.

Across the broader group, 80% of leaders said they wanted employees to remain involved in building and running apps. This indicates many companies see value in keeping development work close to the teams using the tools.

At the same time, the survey found a gap between executive confidence and actual oversight. While 70% of leaders said they were confident they had a complete picture of employee-built apps in their department, 53% of organisations reported finding at least one app in the past year that IT and leadership had not known about.

Barriers to scale

The survey identified several reasons organisations struggle to move these apps beyond small-scale use. Builders most often cited integration with business systems and security or compliance reviews as the main barriers to wider deployment, with both mentioned by 41% of respondents. Testing and reliability followed at 33%.

Support structures also appear limited. While 57% of leaders said their organisations require security and risk assessments, only 32% of app builders said they had access to someone who could help carry out such a review.

Pressure on internal technical teams was another obstacle. Among leaders whose organisations had reviewed an employee-built app, 69% said the process took at least three person-weeks of combined IT and engineering labour. Only 14% of app builders said their organisation had assigned someone to maintain and support the applications after they were created.

These findings point to a familiar problem for companies trying to manage grassroots software development. Staff may be able to create useful tools quickly with AI, but moving them into routine use still depends on formal review, integration work and ongoing maintenance.

Josh Allen, Chief Revenue Officer and General Manager of Pave at Quickbase, said the research reflected frustration with delays in traditional software delivery. "The research shows that employees want to build the tools they need without waiting for overburdened IT teams to create it for them, or having to buy new, off-the-shelf software products that only solve part of their problem. The apps they're building with prototyping tools are valuable ideas, but are typically not ready to be used in production for a number of reasons, including security," he said.

He added: "We built Pave to solve this exact problem-to empower anyone to build, launch, and use the solutions they need without compromising on creativity or security."

The research was conducted through two separate surveys: one of 527 business leaders at Manager level or above with responsibility for software tools, funding or policies, and another of 5,177 employees at Manager level or below. Respondents worked full time in the United States, and no single industry accounted for more than 14% of the sample.