By Samuele Gantner, Chief Product Officer, Nexthink
Imagine a business where every employee has tools created specifically for them. Not just tailored versions of existing software, but a tool that has been built from scratch to support how they want to work. Tools designed to help a specific person be as productive and innovative as possible. Perhaps someone wants to build their own dashboards to look at a specific segment of customer insights and feedback. Or maybe they don’t like the CRM system in place and would prefer to use their own.
Despite being named as 2025’s word of the year, vibe-coding is still in its infancy. But this year vibe-coding is going to make hyper-individualized SaaS applications normal. Today most people are only dipping their toes in the water, making apps to help design weekly meal plans, or organize their schedule. But, given the simplicity and utility of these ultra-personalized tools, it’s only a matter of time before they start being deployed at scale in the workplace. So how do businesses respond?
The vibe-coding inevitability
We’ve all experienced the pain of having to use a handful of ‘IT approved’ applications. Often, they’re slow or inefficient, they frequently crash, and many are so overwhelmingly complex that employees give up trying to navigate them and find workarounds instead. Consequently, enterprise productivity craters, employee dissatisfaction rises, and expensive licences go unused.
With the likes of Loveable meaning that people can put together tools with zero coding skills, it’s evident that employees will soon be developing their own alternatives – if they’re not already! Superior technology always carries an air of inevitability and 85% of workers admit that they rely on unauthorized tools. So, the question isn’t whether these tools will be part of the enterprise, it’s how to manage the trade-offs between productivity and enterprise security.
On the one hand, businesses should be celebrating this development. By buttressing their existing expertise with individualized tools, the average worker will be faster, being more innovative, and more experimental than ever before.
On the other, there are multiple risk and compliance issues that need to be addressed. What if employees share sensitive corporate files and data with their vibe-coded application? What happens to that data? Similarly, what happens if a vibe-coded tool happens to include malware that has been hidden in a publicly available code library? How are issues of authorization and access to these tools going to be managed? These questions, along with concerns around data leakage, ransomware attacks, and other security threats are all factors that need to be identified and addressed.
And beyond concerns around risk and compliance, there are more mundane issues of updating and maintaining these applications. If the creator leaves the company, is there a clear process for handing over responsibility to someone else in the department? If clear ownership isn’t established at the outset, there is the potential for zombie apps to begin piling up through natural employee churn.
You can’t fix what you can’t see
Simply imposing blanket bans hasn’t solved the problem of shadow IT and it’s likely to be even less useful when it comes to vibe-coding. These tools are low cost and they can help significantly increase productivity. Indeed, a blanket ban potentially risks creating dissatisfaction and increased employee churn.
That being said, finding the correct balance between all these factors will look different for each business. Highly regulated industries may not be able to be as permissive of vibe-coded tools as a digital start-up. However, the priority for every IT leader should be figuring out the scale of vibe-coding within the business, the areas where it is most present, and what such tools are being used for.
This requires granular visibility so that businesses can identify if users are using vibe-coding tools such as Loveable, but also the ability to understand how they are being used and for what. Not only does this allow IT to put in place smart, flexible governance processes to maximize productivity while reducing risks, but also enables high-value use cases or tools to be recognized and circulated amongst other users.
Crucially, if businesses can spot high-value vibe-coding examples early, they are in a position to iteratively develop these ideas more swiftly. For example, if someone in marketing develops a new personalized customer outreach tool that performs significantly better, that application can be shared across the department and iteratively improved in ways that are impossible with large-scale SaaS solutions – creating a clear and unique competitive advantage.
Nothing but good vibes
In some ways, vibe-coding isn’t new. It’s merely the logical extension of shadow IT. But while many workers may feel that one SaaS solution is largely the same as another, they are going to be far more attached to a tool they built themselves that is tailored to their needs. It’s been less than two years since the term was coined, but 2026 is going to see an explosion in vibe-coding that many organizations are not ready for.
Each business is going to have to find the right balance between permitting creativity and experimentation and safeguarding the enterprise as a whole. Wherever you end up on that spectrum, the first step is understanding the scale within your own environment.
##
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samuele Gantner is the Chief Product Officer at digital employee experience (DEX) software innovator Nexthink, with nearly two decades of hands-on expertise in IT Experience Management.
