As vibe coding makes its way into the enterprise and AI continues to evolve, it underscores the importance of applying the previous lessons learned through digital transformation.
Many executives believe that vibe coding will have a significant impact on software development and business applications. While it promises to speed up the process for developers and turn mere mortals from the business side of the organization into programming whizzes, vibe coding is not without significant risks.
Parallels between Digital Transformation and Vibe Coding
Today’s buzz around vibe coding harkens back to the last decade’s excitement around digital transformation. The parallels are worth noting. During the initial rush of digital transformation, the ubiquity of tools and apps made it easy for anybody to start using SaaS offerings.
While this alleviated some burdens for IT by putting more technology into the hands of business users, it created other issues. Namely, app sprawl, security risks, subscription redundancy, and the rise of gray work.
Gray work is the result of having too many digital tools that create information silos, making it challenging to easily get a big picture view of a team, project, or the state of the overall business.
For example, creating a quarterly business report often requires pooling information from team leaders across every line of business. Each team under the leaders must go digging through their various digital tools to roll up the data, synthesize, and analyze results. Since the information they need is kept in a variety of tools, it is not uncommon to have inconsistent data that must be reconciled. As a result, employees spend hours preparing a single status document. This issue is known as gray work.
In fact, a recent survey on employee productivity found that gray work was taking up 11 hours a week, on average, of employee time. That time could be better spent on more meaningful activities.
To make digital transformation strategies effective, businesses are prioritizing IT consolidation. In a recent survey of over 1,000 IT professionals, 58% of respondents reported that app sprawl is a problem in their organizations. Further, over 75% say their organizations use more than 10 software apps on a regular basis. To address app sprawl, 90% of companies surveyed say software consolidation is a priority in their organization.
See also: Too Many Tools? How Tool Sprawl Impedes Automation Success
Setting the Foundation for AI Governance
The good news is that 93% of those survey respondents feel confident in their organization’s ability to consolidate software. They realize that, along with reducing costs and improving productivity, IT consolidation is necessary to properly introduce and expand AI in the organization. To do this, businesses are centralizing information on a work management platform to avoid redundancies and ensure data consistency and accuracy.
This way, when employees use AI, the underlying data is solid. Without the proper foundation, AI will exacerbate issues introduced by digital transformation. Taking this a step further, governance has never been more critical. In fact, Gartner cited AI Governance Platforms among 2025’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends.
Scaling Vibe Coding for the Enterprise
Only with proper governance in place can vibe coding go beyond a weekend hack project. As a refresher, vibe coding uses AI to generate code by understanding what the user wants to do. For example, you tell the AI what you want to include in an app, and it will quickly spin one up. You can continue to tweak the app by feeding changes to AI and get what you need without ever having to write a word of code.
Since true vibe coding doesn’t include code review, it is a cause for concern, especially when it comes to compliance, productivity, and accountability. This doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for experimenting with vibe code on low-risk projects. Still, it would not be wise to unleash it without the proper guardrails.
Before vibe coding can be introduced into the organization, make sure the following five rules are in place.
- Reinforce governance frameworks.
- Define and enforce usage requirements and restrictions.
- Document all AI contributions.
- Automate compliance and security checks into development workflows.
- Double down on AI code review to ensure the generated code meets rigorous security, reliability, performance, and quality standards.
As vibe coding makes its way into the enterprise and AI continues to evolve, it underscores the importance of applying the previous lessons learned through digital transformation. These productivity hacks are only beneficial if they do not disrupt the IT strategy or create more work. By prioritizing IT consolidation, bringing together apps and information on a centralized platform, and reinforcing governance, organizations will have the foundation for accelerating AI and supporting experimentation with vibe coding.
