We tried empowering business users with a pure no-code tool three years ago, and you’re right to be skeptical. Out of twelve workflows we handed off to business users, three were actually maintained by those users after handoff. Nine came back to engineering within six months.
What changed for us was shifting from “let business users build” to “let business users understand and modify.” That’s different. We started requiring that whoever deploys a workflow also spends time learning how it works, even if they didn’t build it originally.
With AI-generated workflows, the comprehension problem gets worse because users don’t have the muscle memory of building it piece by piece. The AI generates something that works, but the user doesn’t understand why it works that way.
What actually worked: we built internal governance rules. Any workflow deployed to production has to include a plaintext documentation layer describing what each major section does. It’s extra work upfront, but it makes troubleshooting possible for non-engineers. And we started doing quarterly audits where business users have to trace through their workflows with engineering to catch drift early.