Inside Appian's hyperautomation factory: bots, AI & people

Appian is a patient company.

Despite the fact that the whole tech industry is falling over itself to tell us that it now offers low-code software automation advantages, the arguably more pure-play low-code gurus at Appian have taken it all in their stride and not based the low-code pretenders and ‘me too’ copycats.

Does Appian worry about the low-code ‘me too’ brigade? It seems not.

The company this December just quietly got along with the latest updates to its Appian Low-code Automation Platform, which now offers enterprise automation technologies with enhancements in low-code robotic process automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and process automation.

“Through the course of 2020, the urgency for fast and powerful process automation became undeniable as organisations struggled with the distributed workforces, broken processes, and inaccessible data brought by the pandemic,” said Michael Beckley, founder and chief technology officer at Appian.

Beckley insists that the new platform release delivers unified automation technologies and the development speed that define the new world of hyperautomation.

The new augmentations are accomplished through Appian’s patented SAIL technology, a low-code way to compose and unite all components of an enterprise application, from back-end integrations to interface.

The latest version also enhances Appian’s out-of-the-box AI-enabled Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), a technology meant to save thousands of person-hours per year by eliminating manual form and business document intake, using AI to convert unstructured data into structured data without human intervention.

Bots, AI and people

The latest release uses Appian’s Data Anywhere architecture to unite a ‘workforce’ of bots, AI and people with enterprise data – without requiring any data migration.

Forrester predicts that by the end of 2021, 75% of application development will use low-code platforms, up from 44% in 2020 (Source: “Predictions 2021: Software Development,” 10/30/20, J. Hammond, et al).

New enhancements in the latest Appian release include rapid process and task automation with low-code RPA to record processes and turn them into bots – and create bots that interact with websites and cloud services easily in low-code.

The company has also highlighted its capabilities which integrate and build applications without migrating data – to quickly build unified data views with no-code integrations that now support web services… plus also the chance to cache data from connected sources to improve app performance.

Finally, there’s a 360-degree application health dashboard for developers to centrally monitor application performance and security alerts and identify application design issues and gain intelligent design improvement recommendations.

Image source: Appian