Gartner® made a prediction that caught my attention: “By 2029, 80% of new applications will be intentionally disposable—used for less than one year—revolutionizing the software lifecycle. AI is making application development so accessible that employees will increasingly create temporary applications to meet short-term business needs.”1
Software, it seems, is having its fast-fashion moment. That should give business leaders pause.
Fast fashion democratized access to style. New designs became available to more people, at lower prices, faster than ever before. It also created challenges around quality, waste, transparency, and accountability.
Now, enterprise software could face its own version of that reckoning.
AI is making it possible for businesses to create applications as quickly as fashion brands turn out new collections. Need an app for a product launch? Build one. Want a custom workflow for a short-term project? Generate it. Done with it? Retire it.
Ideas that once sat on a development backlog for months could become working applications in days or even hours. When applications become incredibly easy to create, the conversation shifts from whether we can build something to whether we should, and what happens after we do.
- Who knows an application exists?
- What enterprise data can it access?
- What actions can it take?
- Who's accountable for its behavior?
- What happens to its permissions, records, and connections when it's retired?
A temporary application may exist for just six weeks. But the customer data it accesses, the decisions it influences, and the security risks it introduces can have consequences long after it's gone. In other words, disposable software leaves behind AI waste: orphaned data, forgotten access, and AI agents nobody’s tracking.
Now imagine thousands of these applications appearing and disappearing across an enterprise, often powered by AI agents operating across multiple systems. The complexity adds up quickly. And so does the cost of monitoring, securing, and governing it all.
Today, cleaning up what these apps leave behind usually falls to IT, security, and compliance teams, who rarely built the apps and often don’t know they exist. It doesn’t have to work that way.
As businesses move into this new era, they'll need an intelligent foundation that gives people the freedom to create while ensuring the enterprise stays in control. That requires a different way of thinking about enterprise technology.
Applications may become temporary, but the systems, data, and workflows they rely on need to remain connected, secure, and trustworthy. Organizations need:
- Visibility into what's operating across their environments
- Consistent controls over what AI can access, where it can go, and what it can do
- A way to preserve valuable information as individual applications come and go
This is part of the thinking behind ServiceNow's evolution into a Super Intelligence Control Tower: bringing intelligence, visibility, and governance together across the enterprise so that organizations can innovate without losing control of their operations.
Consider what that could mean in practice. A marketing team could build a new campaign application with governed access to customer information. A finance team could automate a temporary process without exposing sensitive records. IT could maintain visibility into the AI agents and AI-powered workflows operating across the business, even as new ones are introduced.
As the number of applications and AI agents in an organization increases, having a consistent layer of oversight, security, and orchestration becomes more important. And governance needs to keep pace with app and AI agent creation.
The goal should be to make responsible innovation as easy as irresponsible innovation. That means embedding permissions, accountability, and oversight into the way AI-powered tools operate, rather than adding controls after they're already in use.
It also means thinking about the entire lifecycle, including what happens when an application has served its purpose. Data needs to be retained appropriately. Access needs to be revoked. And institutional knowledge should remain available to the business.
As software becomes easier to create, businesses will have more freedom to experiment with how work gets done, with fewer unnecessary barriers between an idea and execution.
A department might generate dozens of applications over the course of a year, each addressing a particular challenge. Some will last a few weeks; others will evolve into something more permanent.
The applications will change. The needs of the business will change. But the value of trusted data, connected workflows, institutional knowledge, and customer relationships will grow.
Every new application should be able to draw on that foundation rather than being built from scratch. And every successful experiment should leave the organization better equipped for the next one.
For business leaders, this changes the way we think about technology investments. The ability to build applications quickly is valuable. So is the ability to maintain continuity, accountability, and trust as those applications evolve.
At ServiceNow, we see an opportunity to help the enterprise connect those two priorities, giving people greater freedom to innovate while maintaining a consistent foundation for the work that matters.
The future of software may look a lot like fast fashion: new collections, shorter lifecycles, endless possibilities for customization. We can make software disposable. But the intelligence, trust, and security that power it have to be built to last.
Find out how ServiceNow can help you discover, secure, and govern AI agents and apps across your enterprise.
1 Gartner Newsroom, Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2026 Orlando: Day 3 Highlights, October 2026
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