As in the famous meme “Emosido deceived” in regards to artificial intelligence. Matt Calkins, CEO and founder of Appian, blamed during the celebration of his annual Appian World event in Denver (USA)
Calkins is one of those different managers that usually has successful diagnoses in regard to the technological sector and its main trends. And AI is the main topic of conversation between both ICT companies and among organizations technology responsible. And his analysis cannot be more accurate: “There is so much hype around the AI that is causing misunderstandings. People are not understanding what AI really is due to all this noise around that technology. They are deceiving us and they are taking time when we could have been obtaining benefits of AI. And what we have to say is that artificial intelligence is very good to do normal work with superhuman efficiency. To work ”.
Calkins’ allegation is not exclusive. Artificial intelligence has radically changed structures and has affected the work formula of IT departments. Now, the Cios not only have to deal with their daily work, but also fight against management teams that want to implement AI at all costs in any type of process regardless of the cost or usefulness of their implementation for the company’s business. All this, because of the famous noise to which Calkins referred.
For the CEO of Appian “we are in the midst of a new technological boom with expenses that amount to hundreds of billions of dollars. Investments in AI exceed everything we have spent, for example, in the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.” And the key is to know if all that investment will bear fruit or is being invested without knowledge.
The important thing: ia agents
To guarantee the profitability of artificial intelligence, it is necessary that it be in the center of workflows. “It’s about taking a certain process and putting AI in the center so that the same thing was done before, but in a much faster and more efficient way.”
For the CEO and founder of Appian, Matt Calkins, there is so much noise around the AI that is causing misunderstandings
That point of view, to bring AI closer to processes and teach their clients where they can squeeze all the juice, is the one that is allowing Appian to be one of the main protagonists in the world of artificial intelligence. The figures are clear: 70% of their customers are already using AI in development or production. And as Calkins himself corroborated, “we have an exponential increase in use. The last quarter, AI grew by 7.9, not 7.9%, but 7.9 times. In fact, we did more activity of AI in the last quarter than in all 2024”.
The vault key of this success lies in the way Appian works. The base is found in the processes, which are the cornerstone of the multinational. As Calkins explained, “in Appian we automate the process in the first place. The process is a team sport. The process requires the best of many people and a careful methodology, step by step. This is how we do our most important works. And that is where we need the AI. We specifically need the agents of AI. I am not talking about chatbots. I am not talking about any other form of ia, nor agents.
These agents work for three premises who have to follow an order: think, execute and learn. “An agent has to think, which means that he has to decide what to do, and then he has to act, which means that he has to execute his plan and has to learn. If he is a good agent, he will learn, which means that he becomes more intelligent over time,” said Calkins.
Data Fabric Revolution
Appian’s evolution has been spectacular. Of being a low-code company to develop a platform that covers and automates almost any process of a company. Its greatest impact and that has marked the future of the company in recent years was its Data Fabric, a layer of architecture that connects and unifies data of disparate systems in real time, without migrating them, creating a unified and virtualized vision. The solution facilitates the modeling, access and analysis of data, accelerating the creation of applications and the digital business transformation. And in it, AI agents have a star role since as Calkins explained: “Data Fabric connects their agents throughout the company. Data Fabric not only allows you credentials of who makes them. ”
The novelties
In the line of promoting and giving value to the agents, Appian presented agent studio and the general availability of AI Document Center. Additional improvements include expanded compatibility with Data Fabric for document management and semantic search in data and documents.
In the case of the first, Appian’s agents are reinforced and the pair, they are more governable than ever. The solution allows users to design and display AI agents with greater autonomy and contextual awareness. These AI agents can reason through complex multiple steps. They can also interact with multiple systems to update records, send emails and dynamically respond to new tickets. Agent Studio allows developers to create intelligent agents that not only execute actions, but also make informed decisions based on real -time data and business logic.
In the case of AI Document Center, its main advantage is that users can create agents quickly and easily with an all -in one application for the intelligent processing of business level documents. It is a tool designed to handle complex documents formats with high precision of extraction and scalability for business workloads. During the event, it was presented how Century Fire Protection, a Company Fire Protection Services Company with a wide presence in the United States, used AI Document Center to automate its accounts to be paid with AI, reducing the operating time of invoices by 36%.
Other improvements in the data fabric platform and total experience include:
• Data Fabric Now includes native documents for documents. Organizations can manage, relate and protect documents through types of registration, which eliminates the need for a folder -based organization and allows developers to create more documents -centered applications.
• Incremental synchronizations support dynamic data environments. Data Fabric now admits the synchronization of external data with a frequency of up to 15 minutes and up to 20 million rows per registration to guarantee current applications and with response capacity.
• Forms headers and assistants accelerate the design of attractive forms. Appian’s user interfaces now automatically incorporate common form headers, assistant functionality and recommend modern UX patterns. The forms generated from Data Fabric will see the greatest improvements.
