Originally published on Intellyx.com

It is a challenging and tumultuous time of continuous change for enterprises. But change also creates significant opportunities for those who can see — and seize — the advantage that the intersection of technologies, such as AI and low-code, can deliver.

Two trends are set to radically transform the way enterprise organizations operate.

The first is the adoption of so-called low-code development platforms. These platforms enable organizations to produce business applications more rapidly and to readily adapt them over time as business demands shift, using graphical interfaces and little-to-no coding.

The second is the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance enterprise business processes. The adoption of AI and related technologies, such as machine learning, is enabling enterprises to build predictive capabilities into systems that simultaneously create greater operational efficiencies and transform customer interactions.

Organizations have been exploring the implications of these emerging trends and their associated technologies as they seek to transform the way they operate and how they engage with their customers. Enterprises are beginning to find great value, both operationally and experientially, as they experiment with and adopt these technologies.

But as powerful as each of these trends is on its own, it may be their combination that becomes a force multiplier as organizations progress through their digital transformation efforts.

Why Organizations Need Both AI & Low-Code

To understand the transformative impact of combining AI capabilities with low-code platforms, you must first understand the business drivers of each of these trends individually.

The idea of artificial intelligence, and its futuristic promise of machines that can ‘think,’ has always stirred the imagination of enterprise executives. In the industrial age, when operational optimization was the primary driver of business value, systems that could improve efficiency, reduce error, and lower costs were alluring.

While AI-powered systems are now delivering all of those benefits and more, their most significant benefit to the organization may be in their ability to predict behavior and outcomes. Organizations can use this predictive information to make better and faster decisions, to optimize investments, and to transform the way they interact with and serve their customers.

Moreover, consumer-based AI-powered systems, from Amazon’s Alexa to smart chatbots, are changing customer expectations — in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business transactions. Everyone, it would seem, now expects the systems they interact with to be intelligent.

At the same time, organizations realize that to keep up with ever-increasing customer demand and expectations, they must automate — everything.

Whether it is to improve operational efficiency or to create a better customer experience, organizations are now looking at nearly every business process and every customer interaction as an opportunity to automate. The challenge, however, is that the resulting demand is wildly outstripping IT’s ability to meet it — at least using traditional development methods and approaches.

For this reason, many enterprises are turning to low-code development platforms to speed development activities and enable application consumers to take a more prominent role in their development and management.

These low-code development platforms enable organizations to minimize the complexity traditionally associated with hand-coding applications and instead allow business users and developers alike to, instead, focus on business functionality and outcomes.

The Power Couple: AI & Low-Code

Up until now, these two trends have progressed independently. In most organizations, the teams working on improving and speeding development have had little or no involvement with those working on applying AI to the enterprise’s business processes.

This separation is ironic. In many ways, both the AI and low-code movements have shared common goals of improving productivity, increasing efficiency, and enhancing the customer experience.

Because they existed in different technology silos within the enterprise, however, organizations saw them as separate entities. That must change.

When brought together, AI and low-code become exponentially more powerful and will enable organizations to turbocharge their efforts on both fronts.

Low-code platforms offer a way to enable organizations to make better, more ubiquitous use of AI across a broader range of business processes.

Today, applying AI to a business process is a time-consuming, specialized activity. But much like they did to make general application development more readily accessible to both professional and business developers, low-code platforms have the opportunity to do the same for the adoption of AI.

Using the same graphically-oriented development approach, low-code solutions can make applying AI to a business process simple, intuitive, and accessible.

The Intellyx Take

We are on the cusp of the next evolution of both AI and low-code technologies as these transformative trends begin to intersect.

The application of advanced AI approaches will likely remain outside the domain of low-code development platforms for some time. But a vast amount of enterprise business processes do not require these advanced approaches. The application of AI to these business processes will deliver transformative and competitive value to those enterprises that can do so quickly.

Moreover, AI promises to further democratize the application development process and make it easier and faster for both business users and professional developers to conceive of, build, deploy, and change even more advanced applications.

The combination of AI and low-code will, therefore, have an exponential impact as organizations strive to simultaneously and continually improve operational efficiency while transforming business models and creating exceptional customer experiences.

It is for this reason that enterprises are turning to those low-code solutions, such as BP Logix’s new Process Director 5.0, that are at the leading edge of this evolution and which are bringing AI and low-code together.

Enterprises will continue to find themselves in the midst of a challenging and tumultuous time of continuous change for the foreseeable future. But this period of change also creates significant opportunities for those who can see — and seize — the advantage that new technologies and approaches offer.

The intersection of AI and low-code is one such opportunity that enterprises should seize without hesitation.

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