At Appian World in Denver, the company showed off a range of new capabilities and how it was embedding AI into the business process. It has also seen a significant increase in AI adoption among its customers, with over 70% already using AI in their business.
Importantly, that success is not about AI being on the cutting edge. Instead, Michael Beckley, CTO and co-founder of Appian, talks about Boring AI. He said, “Appian has been wildly successful at getting AI adoption and agentic AI adoption because we have focused on the boring, non-controversial use cases.”
That “boring” comment is key. It means that AI usage has been measured, planned, and there are KPI’s that show its effectiveness. The focus from Appian clients has been on where the immediate value can be found. Beckley said that is, “document agents, classification agents, extraction agents.”
None of these are people replacing solutions, but they are about replacing and enhancing mundane tasks. They free people up to be effective at what they do.
Another focus for Appian, right from when it started talking about AI, has been private AI. That means the data is kept under the enterprise’s control and not at risk from being used elsewhere.
The company’s Data Fabric solution has been a key foundation for its AI strategy and continues to be so. It not only provides access to data but does so securely. Beckley commented, “We can expose agents to a wider catalog of information with the right security permissions, so that they’re not given free rein to go know everything. But, for within a given context, perhaps to look at a problem from many different dimensions.”
To hear what else Beckley had to say, listen to the podcast.
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