Need a new car? Grab it from a vending machine.

Recently, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba revealed it’s rolling out car vending machines that promise to make vehicle purchasing “as easy as buying a can of Coke.” How it works: Choose your vehicle, get pre-approved and schedule a test drive — all from your mobile device. Then, simply go grab it at your nearest car dispensing facility. If you like the car after a few days, just complete the purchase from your phone. Never enter a showroom or talk to a salesperson.

This may be mind-blowing for most, but for futurists and car aficionados, the trend toward self-serve car buying is nothing revolutionary. For some time now, Tesla has generated buzz around its online vehicle configuration and purchase process. (Full disclosure: Tesla, BMW, McKinsey, Salesforce and Spotify are PagerDuty customers.) Other car makers, including BMW, Hyundai and Mitsubishi, to name a few, have already followed suit.

We are truly at the dawn of a new consumer era. Already, 79% of Americans are now online shoppers. Whether it’s groceries, clothing, life insurance or cars, we are increasingly buying some of our most essential products and services via the internet.

Now, with this enormous shift, a whole new sector of employees sit at the critical junction point where businesses and customers intersect: engineers and developers. They are, after all, designing, building, tailoring and running the platforms, websites and apps that define the new customer experience.

As CEO of a technology business who has led four software companies to date, I know this firsthand. Engineers at my company are constantly analyzing customer experience data to come up with more innovative ideas for the business. So it frustrates me when I see technical teams — particularly in larger non-tech organizations — still being siloed from customers, company decision makers and outward-facing employees. Sure, they keep things running smoothly from behind computers, while the rest of the organization goes about business as usual. Yet, more than ever, company “nerds” are at the crux of the modern digital customer experience. Engineers and developers are the treasure chest of ideas and information organizations need to better access, to successfully navigate the online marketplace and landscape.

Don’t get me wrong — this untapped opportunity isn’t going unnoticed. A recent McKinsey report, for instance, suggests that to survive in a digital age, organizations must make customer-centricity a unifying force that drives all core decisions across the business. A Salesforce study (registration required), meanwhile, reveals that the majority of IT teams are already keenly aware of this, with 79% saying improved collaboration with other lines of business is now one of their most urgent priorities. However, despite the level of intent, only 44% of high-performing IT teams (and a meager 11% of underperformers) are currently successful in aligning strategic priorities across business units.

So what can be done to better bridge the gap? To unlock the increasing business value of technically focused employees, we must systematically empower them to more freely contribute to the rest of the organization. We must begin redefining modern leadership — to embrace technical know-how — for today’s digital business landscape.