Alteryx Powers AI Innovation for Business

For big data company Alteryx Inc., the last year has been about capitalizing on the wave of artificial intelligence.

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted in December 2022, some technology leaders expressed the belief that the future of generative AI was moving quickly evolve towards specific use cases which leveraged proprietary data across verticals. Generative AI applications can improve organizational productivity, but this requires refining models with the right data to provide domain-specific insights.

This gave Alteryx the opportunity to leverage its 27 years in analytics and develop a set of tools that enterprise customers can use to leverage generative AI. At a time when the novelty has worn off after last year’s AI rush and IT organizations are seeking budget-conscious ROI, Alteryx looks ahead to 2024 by providing a framework for how businesses large and small will use this powerful and rapidly evolving technology.

“The idea of ​​an industry or use case specific solution is to accelerate the deployment of technology for those industry and use case specific needs, and thus accelerate the timeline profitability,” said Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE. “Businesses often don’t know where to start when trying to become more predictive and proactive, which is why companies like Alteryx give them starting points for common use cases.

This feature is part of theCUBE’s special AI coverage ahead of Alteryx Inspire. (*Disclosure below.)

New engine for Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform

Over the past year, these starting points have focused on delivering new automatic insights capabilities and no-code tools for novice AI users to create generative, AI-based applications. AI. In May, the company launched a new Machine learning and generative AI engine for its Alteryx Analytics Cloud platform to accelerate customer productivity. The launch included the release of Alteryx Help toa combination of analytics results with large language models to generate smarter, in-context data visualization summaries and document business processes in natural language.

“Data operations is an area that hasn’t seen a lot of innovation lately,” said Holger Muller from Constellation Research, in a interview with SiliconANGLE. “As such, it’s great to see Alteryx deliver a truly new use case that leverages the capabilities of generative AI to help business users better understand data-driven insights.” This is a promising new feature that many say is worth exploring.

Alteryx followed its May launch with another release in October which introduced what the company heralded as one of the industry leaders first deployment-independent interfaces specifically designed for no-code users to leverage generative AI.

Powered by Alteryx AiDIN, the new Alteryx AI Studio allows users to select a large language model from an available list and adjust it using their own custom business data. Another feature, Game Manualsenables faster, simpler insights from data using generative AI.

Alteryx’s latest release demonstrated how the company is taking an aggressive approach in deploying its generative AI strategy to address the need to leverage first-party data.

“It must, because generative AI technology is rapidly moving the bar forward for data preparation and low-code application development,” Henschen noted in a statement. interview last fall with SiliconANGLE.

Industry-specific use cases emerge

Alteryx’s focus on data preparation and low-code tools is helping to pave the way for a growing number of industry-specific use cases in generative AI. Automation of key data preparation and analysis processes has expanded the use of AI across industries and across a wide range of stakeholders.

At multinational e-commerce giant eBay Inc., Alteryx Analytics Cloud was used to train 50 non-technical employees in using AI and building machine learning models. The result was an improvement in the company’s checkout feedback process to detect problems and predict solutions before a human intervenes.

In healthcare, Alteryx works with organizations such as healthcare program advisors to provide more detailed data analysis for hospitals and health systems. What’s remarkable about Alteryx’s involvement in HCPA is how the healthcare consulting firm combined Alteryx with other business intelligence tools, such as Snowflake and Tableau, to generate insights in real time and create visualizations for a revenue monitoring project.

In December, Alteryx announced the creation of a public sector entity to support US institutions in the use of data analytics and AI. In addition to providing analytics services to public sector clients, such as Internal Revenue Service and the Washington StateAlteryx has formed a partnership over the past year with the Department of Defense to help active-duty military members transition to civilian careers.

The company’s work with organizations across multiple industries speaks to the need for analytics to support industry-specific use cases. Alteryx and other companies in the data preparation space are positioning themselves as both horizontal and vertical providers, according to Henschen.

“Alteryx and its competitors, such as DataRobot, Dataiku, RapidMiner and SAS, are primarily horizontal technology providers, offering data preparation, analytics and data science technologies that can be applied in any industry, but they are also using this technology to create industry- and use-case-specific solutions,” Henschen told SiliconANGLE. “These solutions provide at least 80% of what is needed for industry or domain specific use cases, in the form of pre-built data connectors, schemas, templates, reports and dashboards , as well as ways to integrate predictions into actionable workflows.

Democratizing AI for domain experts

The rapid adoption of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, has fueled a democratization of technology across industries over the past year, a trend Alteryx noted in 2022. The company commissioned a study IDC Fact Sheet which identified the need to prioritize the democratization of data and analytics among organizations across all industry sectors.

While 70% of organizations I wanted to be more data-driven, 88% of respondents still faced technological constraints in achieving this, according to the report. The availability of generative AI to domain experts rather than data scientists, along with a growing ecosystem of tools surrounding the technology, has helped overcome barriers to data-driven deployments.

“Domain experts really know best,” said Alan Jacobsonhead of data and analytics at Alteryx, during a interview with SiliconANGLE. “They know where the gold is buried in their companies. They know where the inefficiencies are. It’s so much easier and faster to teach a domain expert a little bit about how to automate a process or how to use analytics than it is to take a data scientist and try to teach them to have the knowledge of an accounting professional 20 years or a logistics expert for your company.

Industry-wide interest in AI has also led to major changes for Alteryx itself. The company was acquired by private equity firms Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners in December for a reported $4.4 billion. At the end of January, Alteryx named Kevin Rubinchief financial officer of the company, as interim CEO following the departure of former CEO Mark Anderson.

Alteryx has also actively entered into a number of industry partnerships to strengthen its position in the competitive data analytics industry. The company achieved Google Cloud Ready – AlloyDB designation in May and expanded its relationship around Looker Studio, Google’s interactive data visualization tool. Most recently, Alteryx announced a expanded partnership and product alliance with Databricks Inc. and its Data Intelligence platform.

The rapid adoption of generative AI has placed companies like Alteryx in the spotlight, as businesses look for ways to capitalize on what this powerful technology can offer. Alteryx’s combination of analytics and automation has attracted the attention of companies looking to leverage AI and capitalize on the global market.

“The return on investment through analytics and automation is incredibly high,” Alteryx’s Jacobson said during a conversation with SiliconANGLE. “The businesses are very successful. What we see again and again, company after company, government agency after government agency, is how analytics truly transforms the way work gets done.

(*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Alteryx Inspire. No sponsor has editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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