The Resonance Test 102: Creating Citizen Developers with Eric Pace

Remember Shadow IT? This has long been an issue in big organizations, and in the era of generative AI — with its powerful, easy-to-operate, democratically available tools — the challenges have scaled, as one says in the vernacular.
One person who has successfully met these challenges is Eric Pace, Head of AI at Cox Communications, who created an interesting and effective citizen developer program at his organization. He brings news of this to *The Resonance Test* in a conversation with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer.
Shekhter begins by asking about the citizen developer model around the development and deployment of agents in the enterprise.
One of the keys to unlocking value in any ecosystem is through adoption,” says Pace. But adoption, in this case, “hinges on one very important thing, and that's AI literacy.”
To accomplish this, Pace and his team gave their colleagues hands-on experience with the tools and capabilities that AI provides. They had access, guardrails, guidelines and references to follow.
Pace notes that he had two paths: (1) “We could either tell them everything is locked down and you can't do any of it” or (2) tell colleagues, “You can play in this open playground and just follow our rules and do all the things you want to go do.” He chose the second option, and it turns out, his people are “very happy in the playground with the fence around it, that we built for them, because it's got all the tools and toys that they need.”
All of which is great… but what does it mean for the business?
“All the executives read are these articles about the trillion dollars that's being spent and the zero impact to the bottom line,” says Pace, adding that CFOs are mostly saying, “Stop wasting all our money.”
Pace correctly says that there is “no instant gratification” involved here. “The notion that I can ask a very complex question and instantly get a very complex answer sets the perception that I can just go implement at scale enterprise-grade capabilities and get value out of them tomorrow.”
Shekhter and Pace agree that this isn’t how things work, especially, says Pace, “When you take into account the change management adoption and process curves that you've got to crawl through to see the value come to fruition.”
Pace reports the projects his citizen developers have created “have absolute potential to go drive the value that we've prescribed as possible in a very near future.”
Listen, and improve *your own organization’s* journey.
Host: Alison Kotin
Engineer: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon