What started out as an advertising slogan for Apple more than 15 years ago has morphed into somewhat of a modern day colloquialism: There should be an app for that. Who hasn’t—ticked off by an inconvenient annoyance or inspired by a stroke of midnight genius—thought, “If only I knew how to code?”
Meet Christel Buchanan.
Buchanan, the founder and CEO of ChatAndBuild, is on a mission to create a world where anyone, regardless of their ability to code, can turn their app dreams into a reality.
“Why can’t a grandmom in Thailand chat and build? Why can’t my dad, who speaks Mandarin, chat and build?” Buchanan asked during a private interview following her panel discussion at Newsweek‘s Women’s Global Impact forum. “Why is that only someone with a Stanford [computer science] degree in the Bay Area gets to build something and then walk away as a multibillionaire?”
The Singaporean tech founder told Newsweek that while her dad isn’t a multibillionaire yet, he’s already built two games with her AI-driven platform. After seeing the mahjong game and Pac-Man game he built, Buchanan realized, “This could be big.”
Using a conversational interface, ChatAndBuild empowers users to “chat” their software ideas into real products. Prompts like, “create an AI-powered horoscope quiz” or “build me a to-do app,” are answered with products that are ready for use.
The rapid ascent of AI has been likened to everything from the rise of the internet to the industrial revolution, but, to Buchanan, the potential of her platform feels closer to Instagram, a tech tool that offers everyone a chance to create.
“If you think about social media, it kind of empowered anyone to take a photo and share it,” she said. “This is going to be the next wave.”
She foresees that app-building and coding will change the same way that photography did with the introduction of smartphones.
“Right now, there’s maybe 5 million coders,” Buchanan said. “How do we make it so that 1 billion people are able to code and talk to a computer?”
As of today, about 150,000 users around the world are using ChatAndBuild to create their own tech products, she said. To put those figures into perspective: Buchanan began working on the platform only earlier this year, and it wasn’t until May that the product was ready for the public.
With ChatAndBuild, users “don’t have to worry about code dependencies, code packages, which programming language [to] use,” she explained during last week’s Tech Savvy: Leveraging AI to Exceed Expectations panel.
“Chat and build, and everything is done for you in one platform,” she said.
Buchanan’s goal to democratize coding stems from her own path. Just a year into university, she abandoned a coveted government-sponsored scholarship in search for something more. It led her to a job at Twitter, where she eventually became the regional head of content for Asia, Middle East and Africa, and later to software company Brandwatch and blockchain platform Zilliqa.
“I’ve always loved technology,” she said with a massive smile. “Because, for me, technology was the great equalizer. It lifted me.”
“With AI, we’re really at the most fundamental change. … Everything [will] be disrupted in the next 10, 20 or 30 years,” she continued.
The AI revolution feels fairly recent for most, but there are already new concerns being raised. Buchanan—who staunchly believes that the future of tech is better understood through hackathons than thought-leadership conferences—said she’s already beginning to see questions pop up about how generative AI models are storing data, with some worried that any intellectual property entered into a chatbot might no longer belong to the user.
“This is something that we need to take note about, which is why I’m developing this idea that you can train and trade your AI agent,” she said. “You should have ownership of your data.”
“I think it’s going to become a very big topic in the next one, two years,” she said. “It’ll be a different kind of doomscrolling.”
It’s why Buchanan has turned her attention to non-fungible agents (NFAs), a decentralized digital entity that would establish unique digital ownership.
“Right now, there is no graphical user interface for AI,” she explained. “It’s a very bare bones kind of thing. We don’t know what the operating system is going to look like, which is why it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens.”
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