Appian reveals generative AI strategy and expanded AI roadmap

Appian is expanding its strategy and roadmap for generative AI in the Appian Platform for process automation, focusing on democratizing access to AI technology to unlock productivity gains for developers. The company’s strategy centers on delivering secure and reliable private AI to protect customers’ data.

“Appian incorporates AI in a practical manner that delivers real customer value,” said Michael Beckley, CTO and Founder, Appian. “Our vision is embodied by the Appian AI Copilot, which uses generative AI to accelerate low-code development and is supported by a family of intuitive, low-code AI capabilities.”

Appian recently announced OpenAI/ChatGPT low-code integration and that ChatGPT is trained on Appian’s declarative SAIL expression language.

Appian also unveiled the Appian AI Skill Designer, a simple and powerful way for organizations to create custom AI machine learning models that don’t require giving their sensitive data to a public AI platform.

Appian is delivering two new AI plug-ins to the Appian AppMarket:

• Appian Azure OpenAI Connected System: Appian increases freedom of choice for customers wanting to use cutting edge generative AI in their business processes. With this low-code connector, your business can seamlessly connect to Azure’s OpenAI Service and combine generative AI with enterprise-grade data security governance.
• Appian Pinecone Connected System: Using the new low-code integration to Pinecone’s vector database, users can query their Appian document knowledge base and retrieve intelligent results based on the semantic meaning of their question. Used in tandem with OpenAI, this integration enables users to chat with their private data and receive contextually relevant information from generative AI.

The Appian Platform is built on an enterprise-ready AI architecture that is delivering real business value today.

According to the company, Appian is continuing to bring innovative generative AI capabilities to market in upcoming releases, including:

• Instant generation of digitized forms from PDFs through AI document understanding.

Appian is combining the power of large language models (LLM) with additional AI training of our SAIL architecture and our document understanding capabilities to develop a new generative AI capability for instant understanding and creation of new applications from existing PDF documents.

• Self-service analytics through AI-powered queries of the Appian Data Fabric with natural language.

Appian is combining our Data Fabric with generative AI and natural language understanding to create a revolutionary capability for self-service analytics. This will empower every user to discover insights from the Appian Data Fabric to improve business operations.

• AI-generated workflows assembled on-the-fly based on natural language prompts.

Appian is training LLM and AI to understand the core nature of workflow and process patterns to support AI-generated workflows. This will empower users to build workflow orchestrations with natural language prompts, further breaking down barriers in human-machine collaboration.

• AI-enabled out-of-the-box solutions.

Appian already delivered AI-generated RFI creation within its Government Acquisition suite and Case Management suite of solutions. New and existing Appian solutions will be imbued with AI capabilities.

“Appian believes low-code and AI are a perfect match,” said Beckley. “Appian’s AI Copilot demonstrates the natural advantages of this union by making its suggestions inside low-code design tools. Low-code is the perfect medium for AI to express application designs while ensuring humans can easily understand and refine AI creations through an intuitive and visual design environment.”

Appian looks forward to releasing expanded generative AI features in its Appian 23.3 release, scheduled for August 2023.

According to the company, Appian intends to continue investing in these AI capabilities, with new features and capabilities coming out in a quarterly release cadence through 2023 and beyond.

For more information about this news, visit www.appian.com.