AI in Low-Code/No-Code Era!

Between October and December 2019, Deloitte surveyed 2,737 IT and line-of-business executives and found that all adopters are using AI to improve efficiency. Mature adopters are also using the technology to boost differentiation. These two enablements -- efficiency and differentiation -- are the most well-known advantages of AI in enterprises.

Despite these clear business impacts, recruiting ML and AI talents is still highly competitive and significantly expensive for SMB and enterprises. One way to address this issue is to create services and enablements where the citizen developers and business analysts (instead of expensive ML/AI resources) can utilize AI services to bring efficiency and differentiation to enterprise world. This is possible through enabling AI within low-code/no-code platforms.

What is Low-Code/No-Code?

According to Alex Wilhelm at TechCrunch, "low-code and no-code refer to tools that allow non-developers to either employ little (low-code) to no code while either building logic inside of software, or full applications". Additionally, Soren Kaplan of Inc. believes that low-code/no-code is the industry disrupter you should pay attention to! This is mainly based on Gartner's forecast of low-code platforms accounting for 65% of all app development by 2024.

In my own words, low-code/no-code platforms enable anyone to build applications in a short amount of time (usually days to weeks), without a need for academic or professional experience in software development. These platforms often provide easy-to-use drag-and-drop capabilities or even easy-to-learn coding capabilities to empower non-developers create applications and become low-code/no-code developers! Today, there are multi-million dollar businesses built on top of low-code/no-code platforms.

In addition to their adoption by passionate entrepreneurs, low-code/no-code tools have been rising in popularity among SMB and enterprises in many industries including manufacturing, education and healthcare; These companies thrive to modernize their workplace and digitize their processes to reduce cost, improve efficiency, and grow their businesses using automation and digitization, without the need for highly technical resources.

On the innovation side, both startups and large corporations have become more active in offering the best-in-class low-code/no-code platforms. Although startups in this space are on pace to raise $500M in 2020, they face fierce competition from large corporations; Apple's Claris owns the market, while Microsoft's PowerApps and most recently Amazon's Honeycode follow as the next leaders. These corporations already own loyal customer-base and existing ecosystem of infrastructure, services and tools, which will enable them to further innovate and serve the SBM and enterprise worlds at a faster pace.

What are the advantages of AI as Low-Code/No-Code?

Today, offering AI to SMB and enterprises is no longer a nice-to-have! With the growing number of internet of things (IoT) devices (currently and in the future through 5G), enormous amounts of data is going to be created, which will drive the rapid expansion of AI across many industries. However, neither SMB nor enterprises have sufficient infrastructure or technical resources to utilize this data to their advantage. And therefore, here comes the critical role of low-code/no-code platforms.

Offering AI services within low-code/no-code platforms enable current low-code/no-code developers to create automation and utilize ML functionalities without a deep technical knowledge of ML and AI. An example is bringing AutoML solutions to SMB and enterprise, with simple and intuitive interfaces.

For this purpose, a low-code/no-code AI system needs to offer five capabilities:

1. enable intuitive collection, storage, labeling and utilization of right data features through multiple sources,
2. enable models that are either pre-trained on public datasets or enable intuitive ways to train new models on private datasets,
3. ensure security and privacy considerations around model training on sensitive data,
4. enable unbiased model testing, and lastly
5. enable easy integration with other components and ecosystems.

How to learn more and become a low-code/no-code developer?

This year, due to the pandemic, many conferences and educations series are happening virtually, enabling thousands of enthusiasts to participate remotely from around the globe, for free!

Engage 2020 is among the events happening this week on Aug 4 and 5! If you are interested in the AI components, I will be on a panel on Aug 5 to discuss opportunities and challenges of enabling AI in this space, with the goal of bringing efficiency, cost-saving, and business growth to SMB and enterprises.

I am eagerly looking forward to meeting both experts and new AI enthusiasts at this session, and am excited about the fruitful conversations on the next wave of low-code/no-code innovations!