Appian and AWS have signed a strategic collaboration agreement to make generative AI more accessible to business processes. Importantly, although it is using AWS technology, Appian says that it will keep customer data private.
Michael Beckley, CTO at Appian, said, “Appian’s collaboration with AWS takes a major leap forward with this announcement. The AI economy is here and it will quickly create a strong competitive advantage for organizations that know how to use it.
“Enterprises that upgrade their core business processes with AI and Appian’s data-driven insights will thrive while those that fail to do so will lose control of their data and their future. Amazon Bedrock is an important enabler for our private AI vision. Together, we give organizations the ability to effortlessly use AI for process automation with data privacy and security at the forefront.”
Taking advantage of cloud-based but keeping data private
As part of this agreement, Appian customers get access to Amazon Bedrock and Sagemaker. It allows them to begin to build LLMs and ML models, respectively, using their corporate data. However, this is unlike most organisations’ use of the AWS tools.
As part of this agreement, Appian is exploring the integration of its Data Fabric with the AWS tools. It wants to ensure that customer data stays private and does not risk accidental leakage. Expecting customers to upload the data to AWS requires that they pay for additional AWS services that they then have to configure and manage.
Keeping the data inside the Appian Data Fabric means that customers don’t have to be concerned about security. There is no need to move data. There is also no need to look at permissions and controls and change how data is secured. All of that has already been done inside the Appian Data Fabric, and by keeping it there, customers can be assured that it remains protected.
Another benefit of this deal is that any LLMs created with Bedrock will stay within the compliance boundaries customers have created. It means that they do not need to increase compliance controls or worry about what using Bedrock means for their compliance teams.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This is a smart move by Appian. It gives customers access to a wider range of tools to create LLMs and do machine learning. At the same time, it ensures that there is no additional risk to their data and removes concerns over the impact on compliance.
It will be interesting to see if this announcement with AWS is followed by support for more AWS tools. It would be a surprise if it weren’t. At the same time, it opens the door for customers who prefer tools on Azure or Google Cloud to ask for similar support. How long before Appian delivers similar partnerships?
While the focus here is on using GenAI and ML tools, there is a more important story for Appian customers. That story is how Appian extends Data Fabric to support other applications and use cases while making itself the trusted data source.
