Appian was the company we knew as the low-code platform specialist, and it still is, except the company’s essential “lowering action” is now a factor of embedded artificial intelligence (AI) into business processes.
The alignment of AI is intended to deliver automations that directly manifest themselves in applications that ship more rapidly and have a profound and positive impact on the bottom line.
Now working to extend its AI purview and capability with (logically enough, you know what’s coming next) agentic AI services, Appian has introduced agentic AI platform enhancements to help build intelligent “process applications” i.e., apps that form part of a wider approach designed to orchestrate critical business processes.
The Appian platform now features its Agent Studio, a service layer that enables users to design and deploy AI agents with autonomy and contextual awareness. This technology is used to build Appian AI agents that the company insists are “more powerful and governable” than ever.
Used at the business process level, AI agents can reason through complex multi-step tasks and interact with multiple systems to update records, send emails and respond dynamically to new inputs. Software developers can use Agent Studio to create agents that execute actions and make informed decisions based on real-time data and business logic.
AI Good, AI + Process Orchestration Better
“As long as Appian keeps making the best process orchestration tools, people (and AI) will continue to rely on us for their core business workflows in financial services, life sciences, manufacturing and government,” said Michael Beckley, CTO and founder, Appian. “AI’s potential is maximized when combined with strong process orchestration tools. Appian, with advanced process models and [our] data fabric, provides the framework for AI’s safe and reliable operation, especially in regulated industries, by addressing validation and control. Integrating AI with process orchestration allows organizations to leverage AI’s power while maintaining control, ensuring responsible AI use.”
The company has also detailed the general availability of AI Document Center, a service that enables software engineers and business users to create and refine models for both document classification and extraction. Additional enhancements include expanded data fabric support for document management and semantic search across data and documents
Users can create intelligent document processing (IDP) agents with Appian AI Document Center. This part of the company’s platform is designed to handle complex document formats with high extraction accuracy and scalability for enterprise workloads.
Boring, But Brilliant
“Appian is the best way to build, manage and change an organization’s business processes, but this might be the most ‘boring’ AI story you ever read,” half-joked CTO Beckley, speaking to press this month. “This is because Appian delivers real value at a core foundational infrastructure level inside processes. This is not controversial or flashy AI (in fact its highly governable and compliant), it is AI that operates with the requisite amount of human oversight needed so that risk metrics are measurable and managed even when dealing with complex unstructured datasets. It sorts and classifies information to put humans in control of the processes that they themselves generate and exist within.”
Another part of the wider story here is Appian Smart search, a service that uses AI-driven semantic search to enhance record retrieval. Smart search allows users to search across your entire data fabric, including text fields or documents attached to a record at enterprise scale. Smart search goes beyond keyword matching by interpreting intent, uncovering connections, detecting patterns, and surfacing related records.
In addition to high availability, generative AI Agents can now be used in autoscale processes, helping enterprises stay responsive and efficient even when demand increases. Autoscale is an Appian Cloud capability that dynamically adjusts process execution capacity based on demand. Specifically designed for high-volume, high-throughput automation, process autoscale delivers 10-100x the power without over-provisioning resources. Now, organizations can power their high-volume, high-value generative AI use cases with enterprise-grade AI.
Other platform enhancements to data fabric and total experience include the fact that Appian data fabric now includes native support for documents. Organizations can manage, relate, and secure documents using record types, eliminating the need for folder-based organisation and allowing developers to create more document-centric applications. Data fabric now supports external data sync as frequently as every 15 minutes and up to 20 million rows per record to ensure current, responsive applications.
Appian’s AI Developer Message
Keen to establish a more concrete relationship with its developer community, the company used this year’s Appian World conference to host its first DevCon event with dedicated keynotes and sessions. Speaking at the opening address, Appian’s head of global solutions consulting Gregg Aldana, argued that there is now a “compelling need” for a platform like Appian that can help organizations orchestrate business processes using AI. This, he says, can now form an integral part of the developer workflow across the company’s data fabric (an architectural approach that connects and manages data from various sources with a unified access channel) with AI functionalities like smart unit tests and more.
“Appian Agent Studio heralds a completely new era in orchestration,” enthused Aldana. “I know there’s a bunch of companies out there saying that they have a data fabric and, well, that’s just a bunch of PR… this [Appian’s platform] stuff is real and it enables software engineers to inject AI inside business processes and make applications smarter and more capable. Developers can now use a single unified approach to RPA inside the Appian platform – and now, with agentic AI in RPA available on Appian – users can ask questions in natural language inside enterprise software systems ranging from ERP suites to mainframes. All of which means, applications ship more quickly and work happens smarter.”
Gradually becoming more laid back and perhaps quietly confident in his company’s position in the market, Appian CEO Matt Calkins has underlined the threads discussed here to emphasize just how process-centric Appian is today.
“All the hype around AI is causing [levels of] misunderstanding,” said Calkins. “Quite simply, AI is for doing plain old regular jobs, but with superhuman efficiency. People need to look at their jobs and look at the things that they do every day, identify the mission-critical high-volume work that they need AI to help underpin. Some 70% of our customers are now using Appian AI in development or production. When you run AI inside a process, so many variables are taken off the table… it sets to work on the interface, the workflow and the monitoring. We think AI should be a worker and not a helper, process needs to be a team sport and AI is now a player on your team.”
The Process Procession
Coming full circle, we said at the start that Appian has been known as the low-code company… perhaps the “original” low-code company even. That was back at the end of the last decade and, as even the casual observer would have noticed, suddenly every enterprise technology vendor quite quickly became a low-code specialist. Now that Appian is the AI in process orchestration company, will the rest of the technology industry follow suit? It’s a strong “maybe”. Let the process procession commence.
