AppManagEvent 2025 — October 10
Brian gave the closing keynote at AppManagEvent 2025 in Utrecht, Netherlands, to an audience of app management and end-user-computing practitioners. His argument: AI platforms are becoming the primary gateway to work for knowledge workers, and app management itself has to evolve into something new — capabilities orchestration.
The workspace doesn't change — who attaches to it does
The core framing: a workspace is apps, data, identity, security, and context. For 30 years the worker attaching to that workspace has been human. AI doesn't change the workspace model — it adds a second kind of worker attaching to the same one. "AI platforms can gradually have more and more access to your applications... all of the applications and processes and workspace and security that we use with all our workers today that are humans will also apply to our AI workforce."
Citrix's own origin story is the precedent: in the 90s, the pitch was "rewrite everything for the web." Citrix won by making existing Windows apps work everywhere instead. "Corporations don't do the best, cleanest, theoretical best things. They do what works." Same pattern now — don't rebuild for AI, wrap what exists.
Interfaces are inverting
Historically every interface was built for humans, and AI had to fake being human to use it (typing, clicking, reading pixels). That's temporary. "Everything out of my workspace is no longer built for humans. Everything out of my workspace is built for AIs to consume, and then the AIs, if there is a human interface needed, will generate that human interface." Computer-using agents, browser control, and pixel-scraping are the transition-period workaround, not the destination — the same way humanoid robots borrow the human form factor only because the world is built for humans.
OSWorld: the benchmark for "can AI use a computer at all"
OSWorld (369 real desktop tasks, described in plain English) measures raw computer-operating ability, not judgment. Humans score ~72%. AI agents scored 12% at launch (April 2024); 61% by August 2025; 70% the week of this talk. "What happens when these things are as good as humans? What happens when they're better? What happens when they score 100%?"
Every worker becomes an accidental citizen developer
The real disruption isn't AI-inside-apps — every product already has that, the same way every app got a mobile version a decade ago. It's workers using their own AI to spin up ephemeral, undocumented "apps" without realizing that's what they're doing: "Hey ChatGPT, do my expense report" becomes a standing weekly process nobody scoped, approved, or can fully explain. "This is not shadow IT... I call this more like alternate universe IT." These apps are invisible, constantly changing (different runtime, different code, same prompt), and untracked — "dark matter" evidenced only by their output.
The Excel example makes the endpoint concrete: Claude was trained on enough real spreadsheets that it can read and write .xlsx files directly. "It turns out the application only exists to manipulate the data and the files. If the AI has true enough understanding of the applications, the data, and the files, I don't need the actual application portion of this."
From application management to capabilities orchestration
You can't vet 10,000 ephemeral apps or approve every automation — so the unit of management moves from the app to the environment it runs in: secure the workspace as control plane, not the application. Five concrete near-term shifts: accept that creating an app now costs less than the meeting to discuss it; shift security from application-level to environment-level; add radical observability (session recording, guardrails) since you can't pre-approve what you can't predict; build a supported path for citizen development, because it'll be all workers, not just the technical ones; and expect application lifecycles to compress from weeks to seconds.
Longer-term: "context is the killer feature moving forward" — understanding what a worker is trying to do, with what data, under what constraints, matters more than which app does it. The job title changes from application management to capabilities orchestration.
The close
"Your job managing applications has an expiration date... but the mindset of managing applications is going away. Now the good news is your skills in managing digital workspaces are more valuable than ever." The technical capabilities keep compounding regardless of anyone's opinion of them — benchmarks that were "18 months out" keep landing in two months instead. "This is happening whether you like it or not."
Full talk transcript: explore this talk in the brain.