No, Users Shouldn't Write Their Own Software

Salesforce this week announced “myEinstein” self-service artificial intelligence features to let non-technical users build predictive models and chatbots. My immediate reaction was that's a bad idea: top-of-the-head objections include duplicated effort, wasted time, and the potential for really bad results. I'm sure I could find other concerns if I thought about it, but today’s world brings a constant stream of new things to worry about, so I didn’t bother. But then today’s news described an “Everyone Can Code” initiative from Apple, which raised essentially the same issue in even clearer terms: should people create their own software?

I thought this idea had died a well-deserved death decades ago. There was a brief period when people thought that “computer literacy” would join reading, writing, and arithmetic as basic skills required for modern life. But soon they realized that you can run a computer using software someone else wrote!* That made the idea of everyone writing their own programs seem obviously foolish – specifically because of duplicated effort, wasted time, and the potential for really bad results. It took IT departments much longer to come around the notion of buying packaged software instead of writing their own but even that battle has now mostly been won. Today, smart IT groups only create systems to do things that are unique to their business and provide significant competitive advantage.

But the idea of non-technical workers creating their own systems isn't just about packaged vs. self-written software. It generally arises from a perception that corporate systems don’t meet workers’ needs: either because the corporate systems are inadequate or because corporate IT is hard to work with and has other priorities. Faced with such obstacles to getting their jobs done, the more motivated and technically adept users will create their own systems, often working with tools like spreadsheets that aren’t really appropriate but have the unbeatable advantage of being available.

Such user-built systems frequently grow to support work groups or even departments, especially at smaller companies. They’re much disliked by corporate IT, sometimes for turf protection but mostly because they pose very real dangers to security, compliance, reliability, and business continuity. Personal development on a platform like myEinstein poses many of the same risks, although the data within Salesforce is probably more secure than data held on someone’s personal computer or mobile phone.

Oddly enough, marketing departments have been a little less prone to this sort of guerilla IT development than some other groups. The main reason is probably that modern marketing revolves around customer data and customer-facing systems, which are still managed by a corporate resource (not necessarily IT: could be Web development, marketing ops, or an outside vendor). In addition, the easy availability of Software as a Service packages has meant that even rogue marketers are using software built by professionals. (Although once you get beyond customer data to things like planning and budgeting, it’s spreadsheets all the way.)

This is what makes the notion of systems like myEinstein so dangerous (and I don’t mean to pick on Salesforce in particular; I’m sure other vendors have similar ideas in development). Because those systems are directly tied into corporate databases, they remove the firewall that (mostly) separated customer data and processes from end-user developers. This opens up all sorts of opportunities for well-intentioned workers to cause damage.

But let’s assume there are enough guardrails in place to avoid the obvious security and customer treatment risks. Personal systems have a more fundamental problem: they’re personal. That means they can only manage processes that are within the developer’s personal control. But customer experiences span multiple users, departments, and systems. This means they must be built cooperatively and deployed across the enterprise. The IT department doesn't have to be in charge but some corporate governance is needed. It also means there’s significant complexity to manage, which requires some sort of trained professionals need to oversee the process. The challenges and risks of building complex systems are simply too great to let individual users create them on their own.

None of this should be interpreted to suggest that AI has no place in marketing technology. AI can definitely help marketers manage greater complexity, for example by creating more detailed segmentations and running more optimization tests than humans can manage by themselves. AI can also help technology professionals by taking over tasks that require much skill but limited creativity: for example, see Qubole, which creates an “autonomous data platform" that is “context-aware, self-managing, and self-learning”. I still have little doubt that AI will eventually manage end-to-end customer experiences with little direct human input (although still under human supervision and, one hopes, with an occasional injection of human insight). Indeed, recent discussions of AI systems that create other AI systems suggest autonomous marketing systems might be closer than it seems.

Of course, self-improving AI is the stuff of nightmares for people like Nick Bostrom, who suspect it poses an existential threat to humanity. He may well be right but it’s still probably inevitable that marketers will unleash autonomous marketing systems as soon as they’re able. At that point, we can expect the AI to quickly lock out any personally developed myEinstein-type systems because they won’t properly coordinate with the AI’s grand scheme. So perhaps that problem will solve itself.

Looking still further ahead, if the computers really take over most of our work, people might take up programming purely as an amusement. The AIs would presumably tolerate this but carefully isolate the human-written programs from systems that do real work, neatly reversing the “AI in a box” isolation that Bostrom and others suggest as a way to keep the AIs from harming us. It doesn’t get much more ironic than that: everyone writing programs that computers ignore completely. Maybe that’s the future Apple’s “Everyone Can Code” is really leading up to.

____________________________________________________________
*Little did we know.  It turned out that far from requiring a new skill, computers reduced the need for reading, writing, and math.