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WASHINGTON DC – Among the innovations presented at Appian World 2024, the annual international conference of the leading software company in the automation of business processes, there is the implementation of the long-standing strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Specifically, the agreement is aimed at enhancing Appian’s data fabric with the generative artificial intelligence capabilities offered by the Amazon subsidiary. On the one hand the service provided by Amazon Bedrock, which allows you to choose which Large Language Model to use among the many available, and on the other on the machine learning features provided by Amazon Sagemaker, the AWS cloud service that allows you to create, train and deploy custom Ai models. The agreement signed with the cloud computing giant is a concrete step forward for Appian to strengthen its platform created to automate business processes with AI, having the certainty that its data remains safe and confidential and that it will not be used for train large language models.
Appian’s PrivateAI concept
Privacy and security in the use of data are central concepts for the American company listed on the Nasdaq, which last year had a turnover of 545 million dollars and has just celebrated 25 years of activity. Appian’s “private Ai” approach offers medium to large companies the possibility of having maximum control over their data, ensuring that the results and data managed by artificial intelligence remain “on site”, i.e. owned by the client company and not transferred, as underlined, to third-party clouds to train general artificial intelligence languages. In practice, private Ai brings together the information in the Appian cloud (data fabric) with the user’s questions in natural language, eliminating complexity of having to train artificial intelligence models and in which questions and answers are profiled based on who is querying within the data fabric. An ideal systemic approach for companies that are facing a shortage of data scientists and IT skills and that need to easily incorporate artificial intelligence into business processes while maintaining the level of security of their data at the highest levels. A mission confirmed in a meeting with the international press by Matt Calkins, CEO and founder of Appian. “We should be more conservative about the information we expose to AI. Most AI vendors ask to centralize company data in order to train their algorithm. Our approach is the opposite: we leave the data where it is and access it as needed to inform the AI and provide answers to the questions it is asked. In a scenario where other providers want centralized and ideally proprietary data, our private AI guarantees privacy and security through decentralization”. According to Appian, a more ethical and secure AI constitutes a competitive advantage on the corporate market compared to other providers of artificial intelligence platforms, as underlined in the speech by CTO Michael Beckley: «The affirmation of artificial intelligence is a reality and will quickly create a strong competitive advantage for organizations that know how to use it. Companies that upgrade their core business processes with Appian’s AI and data-driven insights will thrive, while those that don’t will lose control of their data and their future.”
Appian enhances AI and announces new customer acquisitions in Italy
At the same time, Appian also announced the introduction of new Ai features with the Process HQ release, designed to maximize operational efficiency and strategic decision-making based on data, without having to resort to expensive and time-consuming data collection activities, reducing costs and risks . In particular, there are eleven new Ai skills introduced with Process GQ (document summary, PII identification, data extraction from documents and emails, text generation and more) to which is also added the introduction of an Ai Copilot, which automates the most repetitive development activities by generating examples of data and application tests, thus simplifying the work of developers. A need that also passes through the Italian companies and PAs with which Appian has collaborated since 2105, reiterated by Silvia Speranza, regional vice president. «In Italy, Appian’s growth year on year is around 30% in terms of revenue and this year we have the ambition to grow by 40% distributed both in software and services», begins Speranza in a chat following the announcements of Washington, announcing two or three acquisitions that will be made official in the coming months. This is thanks to a common strategy on the market and a partner channel that has increased its value since 2023, on which Appian will remain focused in 2024, pushing on the valorization of key partners, around fifteen, including the Municipality of Milan from 2021 (awarded for digitalisation), Eni, Iccrea Cooperative Banking Group (13 banking applications developed in one year thanks to the low-code platform), the pharma world (Angelini, Sanofi, Novartis) and Poste Italiane with which productivity was improved by 70%.