Which internal function is the highest-return buyer for AI app-building tools: operations or product and engineering?
4 recorded positions from 4 people, first said Jan 22, 2025. They do not agree — the readings below are what each one actually argued.
Nontechnical business functions are the real market for app building tools
George Sivulka · Jan 22, 2025
CTOs and IT teams are the loudest about enterprise AI but know the least about the business; the people closest to the business are the ones who actually understand how to apply AI
CTOs building specific vertical AI applications is like trying to build the CRM before Excel was invented — business users need the general platform first to discover use cases
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Harry Stebbings · Jun 13, 2026 · hedged
Lovable and similar tools are pivoting toward enterprise non-developer functions like sales, marketing and support rather than developer use cases
Their value is letting people with no development experience create materials
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Also on the record
Amjad Masad · Apr 25, 2026
Operations teams are the most underserved and highest-ROI segment for AI app building — the return is as good as or greater than for product teams
Ops sits at the nexus of data flow, buys lots of siloed SaaS they dislike, and runs manual Excel work; with Replit they sell more and need fewer people, whereas product teams only compress the development lifecycle
18:33 Operations teams are the highest roi underserved buyer
Matan Grinberg · Jun 13, 2026
It would be ill-advised for the vibe-coding tools to target nontechnical people writing code for code's sake, though serving salespeople building custom demos or websites can have value
Anything requiring enterprise controls over database and code access will be run by engineers, which is Factory's territory
63:13 Engineers keep controlled code nontechnical tools fit non code artifacts
Your assistant can query this graph directly — 4 positions here, 19,646 across the corpus. Add 996.fm over MCP.