A global survey of 1,666 IT professionals finds that nearly three-quarters (74%), plan to build ten or more applications over the next 12 months, with nearly half (45%) planning to build 25 or more.

Conducted by the market research firm Centient on behalf of OutSystems, the survey finds that 40% say new apps make up 51% to 100% of all projects, while 41% report these projects make up 26% to 40% of their total development efforts.

The survey finds that nearly half of respondents (47%) prioritize the building of external-facing applications over internal/employee-facing applications (27%) and core systems/mission-critical applications (27%).

Among respondents working for organizations prioritizing external-facing applications, nearly half (49%) combine traditional and generative artificial intelligence (AI) coding to build them. A total of 88% of respondents said their organization is at least “testing the water” for using generative AI to build applications, while another 19% already consider generative AI to be a strategic imperative.

However, less than a third (31%) said AI is already an integral component of their software development practices while another 42% report they have integrated AI into specific areas of their software development lifecycle (SDLC). Test automation and quality assurance (60%), code generation and auto-completion (57%) and automated bug detection and resolution (55%) top the list of processes being augmented using generative AI tools.

Despite that level of adoption, half of respondents also noted their organization is encountering significant complexities with integrating AI technologies into existing software development workflows. Other major challenges include security and governance (62%) and a lack of talent and skills (45%

Overall, only 38% claimed they have a good general knowledge of how to employ generative AI to build applications, compared to 44% of respondents who consider themselves to be either in the intermediate (32%) or beginner (12%) phases. A total of 40% said that building applications that have generative AI capabilities is an essential component of their application development strategy.

The top benefits cited from using generative AI are increased developer productivity (42%) and improved developer performance (35%) but only 40% “mostly” trust GenAI to write code without human assistance.

Top use cases for applications that are being built by developers augmented by generative AI include customer support (68%), sales productivity (58%) and marketing productivity (54%). Despite the emphasis being placed on building new applications, however, 73% of respondents also noted that modernizing legacy software is either “significant” (47%) or “central” (26%) to their application development strategies. A total of 42% said existing legacy technology is the top blocker of innovation, followed by budget constraints (39%) and a lack of skills (36%).

OutSystems CIO Tiago Azevedo said that given the growing backlog of applications that need to be developed, it’s probable more applications going forward will be built using low-code tools that provide access to AI capabilities. OutSystems, for example, developed OutSystems Mentor to provide access to a set of generative AI capabilities. In fact, given the growing backlog, it’s now only a matter of time before organizations rely more on so-called “citizen developers” to build applications using generative AI tooling.

The challenge is incorporating a set of tools that create probabilistic outcomes that then need to be integrated into business workflows that are largely deterministic in the sense they need to be executed the same way every time.

No matter how fast those applications are built, however, the one thing that is yet to be determined is to what degree will organizations be able to successfully deploy those applications at the level of scale required.