In Ratatouille, Chef Gusteau declared, “Anyone can cook,” and a rat from the sewers proved him right by serving the city’s toughest critic the best meal of his life. Innovation came from the most unexpected place imaginable.
That same story is playing out inside your company right now. The kitchen doors are open. Now everyone’s reaching for the knives. A finance manager who has never written code just built an AI agent that generates her month-end close report in minutes. A supply chain analyst built a chatbot that lets his team query inventory in natural language. They’re not filing SIMs or submitting tickets. They’re just building. Innovation is coming from every corner of the org chart. Your org chart doesn’t know it’s a software company yet, but your people do.
But just because everyone has access to the kitchen doesn’t mean every dish will land. Some will be undercooked. Some will use ingredients they shouldn’t touch yet. Without the right guardrails, open kitchens create risk as fast as they create value. AI is fundamentally changing how we innovate, and the pace will not wait for us. Leaders who know how to prioritize, set guardrails and cultivate a builder culture will keep up. Those who wait for permission to innovate will be waiting for relevance next.
Every Function Can Be a Software Company
Every function in your company has hidden builders. Don’t leave that capacity on the table. AI has collapsed the barrier between having an idea and having a working tool. An HR analyst frustrated with a manual process no longer needs months for a vendor update or IT sprint. She needs an afternoon. In that afternoon, she discovers she’s a builder, revealing capacity no job description ever anticipated.
These are not rogue actors. They are your most entrepreneurial talent responding rationally to a world where waiting is no longer viable. The IT backlog is where competitive advantage goes to die.
Your best talent will become builders if you create the conditions for it. By encouraging your people to build, you keep them, you and your company relevant and competitive in a market changing faster than any previous cycle. This is a compounding bet that every builder you unlock multiplies the next wave of innovation across your organization.
Guardrails, Not Gates
Distributed innovation requires guardrails, not prohibition. The goal isn’t to lock the kitchen, it’s to make sure the fire extinguisher is within reach. Pre-approve low-risk experimentation so people can move at the speed of their ideas. Reserve formal review for high-consequence deployments touching regulated systems or sensitive data. Make the safe path the easy path and compliance becomes the default.
In this age of AI, where building is no longer confined to IT, CFOs need new guardrails designed to guide rapid innovation from every corner of the org chart and new metrics that reward a fail-fast, innovate-imperfectly mentality. Every function under you needs to guide their teams to distinguish two-way doors from one-way doors. A one-way door (e.g., a model making pricing decisions without human in the loop) demands rigorous oversight. A two-way door (e.g., a sandboxed prototype with synthetic data) allows calculated action at speed. Too many organizations overmanage two-way doors and undermanage on-way doors. Flip that. Match oversight to consequence and measure accordingly. Don’t use the metrics and guardrails of yesterday to measure tomorrow’s innovation.
Now What?
CEOs: Are you ready to see every function not just as consumers of AI but as builders themselves? Are you ready to leverage your IT teams as the partner that spreads a builder mentality across every function?
Start with a builder sprint. Pick one week this quarter. Challenge every function (finance, HR, ops, legal) to bring their teams together with IT and prototype one AI solution to a pain point they own. Your function leaders will quickly see who their builders are. For specific inspiration, see how one function, finance, built up AI tools as shared by Amazon Web Services John Felton during re:Invent 2025, of which three are highlighted in this article with CFO Leadership.
Set the mandate: building is part of the job. Direct every functional leader to rewrite one role on their team to include “builds and iterates on AI-assisted workflows” as a core competency, and cascade builder goals across existing employees. When building is formally part of the job across the enterprise, it becomes the DNA of your next generation of leaders.
Stand up a zero-friction sandbox. Direct your CTO to create an enterprise-wide environment where any team member, regardless of function, can experiment with AI tools and safe data copies. Give your builders the right environment, and they’ll show you what’s possible.
Your people are already cooking. The question is whether they do it with your support or in spite of you.
About the authors
Christine Cheng, Global Go-to-Market Leader, Enterprise, Amazon Web Services
Christine Cheng is a Global Go-to-Market Lead at AWS, focused on transforming how enterprises engage with AI across the C-Suite. With 10+ years of experience driving growth across enterprise companies, including eight years in Finance at Amazon, she brings a practitioner’s lens to the intersection of technology and business strategy.
Syed Hoda, Innovation Strategist, Amazon Web Services
Syed Hoda is an Innovation Strategist at AWS, helping companies use innovation to achieve market growth, operational impact, and happier customers. Previously, he held C-Suite roles at four software companies, including VP/GM at Cisco. He teaches at UC Berkeley and serves on the Silicon Valley Board for Human Rights Watch.
