The new AI features are aimed at non-technical business users as well as technical ones, expanding the democratization of analytics to cover many more users.

Today, at their Inspire 2023 event in Las Vegas, analytics automation vendor Alteryx is announcing a series of new AI innovations and updates to their Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform, which combines their Alteryx Analytics with generative AI and large language models. This is intended to accelerate cloud analytics adoption, speed business processes with centralized data governance and security, help all users make intelligent locations-based insights, and supercharge the democratization of analytics.

“There is a tremendous amount of hype around Generative AI proportional to the potential,” said Adam Wilson, SVP and General Manager, Alteryx Analytics Cloud. “It’s early. That being said, there are some products starting to make their way into the market. At Inspire, we are not just demoing, but actually have product.”

Wilson outlined the philosophy behind the announcements.

“We started as a geospatial transformation company, and location analytics has always been key for us,” he said. “We now are bringing location analytics to the Alteryx intelligence cloud, which are not just for technical people, and which leverage the power of data warehouses like Snowflake. Customers have asked us to be able to analyze telemetry data in more detail. We now do that in a more automated way, and have added more authentication mechanisms, which are needed by very large users.”

The key announcement is Alteryx AiDIN, the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and generative AI engine that operates across the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform to accelerate analytics efficiency and productivity. It lets anyone capture the competitive advantage of AI and ML, whether they are highly technical, or untechnical line of business users.

“AiDIN is an AI engine, which is designed to make it easier to every persona to interface in their preferred medium,” Wilson said. “Business users can use no code, while coders can use languages like Python. Increasingly, more enterprise deployments are collaborations between technical and less technical users, and AiDIN learns from the data to speed up that process for both.”

The innovations for AiDIN includes the expansion of Auto Insights, which is one of the tools that automates end-to-end insights for business uses.

“A key issue is why can’t data sets tell us what’s most interesting about them, to understand root cause and correlation,” Wilson indicated. “Auto Insights deals with the problem of ‘where do I start.’”

Magic Documents, a new Alteryx Auto Insights feature, uses an enterprise-grade generative AI integration to revolutionize data insights reporting and sharing with stakeholders.

“Magic Documents gets to the end of this process,” Wilson said. “It lets us take things we have learned and make it easier to communicate those out.” This comes through smart, in-context data visualization summaries, as well as seamless PowerPoint, email, and message generation capabilities for tailored audiences.

Alteryx Designer has also been enhanced with Workflow Summary for Designer. It lets users document their processes more effectively by automatically generating workflow summaries and metadata in natural language.

“In a perfect world, someone would document everything in a workflow, but the reality is that this documentation doesn’t often get done,” Wilson stated. “This lets governance and auditability of all workflow data processes be done much easier.”

Also new is the OpenAI connector, which lets users roll Generative AI into their own Alteryx Designer workflows.

“It lets users use Generative AI to transform how data is communicated and shared,” Wilson said. It features an easy-to-use drag-and-drop tool which generates compelling natural language outputs from users’ data and analytics.

“Those are all being announced, demoed and are available for shipping now,” Wilson stressed. “This is real production grade product. There is as well a whole raft of new innovation just around the corner that we will be previewing, and which are called Alteryx Sneaks.”