AI/ML and analytics in the cloud are driving digital transformation.
I had the opportunity to speak to Jay Henderson, V.P. Product Management at Alteryx prior to the Alteryx Inspire user conference.
Organizations have accelerated the adoption and implementation of digital transformation tools and processes over the past year at a three to five times faster rate than before COVID as they realize the need to get their arms around all of the data they've been collecting, meet the needs of their employees and clients, and achieve productivity gains.
Alteryx is striving to help companies empower analysts and knowledge workers throughout the enterprise with repeatable analytics, data science, and business process automation. Knowledge workers need access to analytics capabilities across all verticals (i.e. public sector, retail, financial services, and healthcare) and functions (i.e. finance, marketing, production, and HR).
Automated machine learning empowers business domain experts and data scientists to obtain data-driven insights more quickly. Rather than relying on experts to code complex models, knowledge workers can build, validate, iterate, and explore ML models with an automated and guided user experience.
Other announcements at Inspire included:
Alteryx Machine Learning (ML) provides guided, explainable, and automated machine learning (AutoML), allowing both analysts and data scientists to leverage the latest ML algorithms and data science best practices to drive analytic maturity to their enterprise. Innovations include:
Fully guided AutoML and ready-to-use ML models
Feature Engineering and Deep Feature Synthesis for highly accurate predictions
Automated Insight Generation to uncover hidden factors and key relationships in complex data
An ‘Education Mode’ and data science best practices, making ML accessible to everyone
“We have too many use cases and very little time to pursue them,” said Nathan Patrick Taylor, chief information officer of Symphony Care Network. “That’s why Alteryx Machine Learning is so valuable — it empowers analysts to create valuable machine learning models on their own. Our data science leads can then easily validate and promote the models into production.”
Alteryx Intelligence Suite extends AutoML capabilities to harness all types of data including unstructured and complex data. Highlights include:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text Mining with drag-and-drop automation
Computer vision capabilities for image-based data and OCR for complex semi-structured data
Topic modeling and sentiment analysis to extract signals in data for actionable insights
Alteryx Designer Cloud brings the widely adopted Designer product to the cloud, enabling ubiquitous access. Highlights include:
Capabilities in the cloud with one-click browser access
Smart interoperability between Designer Cloud and Designer Desktop
Drag-and-drop, no-code access to cloud data platforms, applications, and on-premises data
Visual data prep, blending, analytics, and outcomes that can be published to diverse endpoints
Personalization of the user experience and Designer’s ease-of-use
Alteryx Designer 2021.2 advances capabilities to enable end-to-end analytics automation outcomes. Highlights include:
300+ drag-and-drop capabilities to automate data prep, blending, analytics, and data science
Deeper integrations to Snowflake, UiPath, BluePrism, Tableau, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and others
Holistic data profiling capabilities to speed data prep and an integrated Interactive Results Grid
Faster creation of automation apps and macros that can be packaged as analytic workflows
Unified Platform API + SDK enables users to extend and embed Alteryx functionality into application interfaces, dashboards, and business processes. Highlights include:
A fast path to building new automation building blocks and applications in Alteryx Designer
Extensibility to build, package and publish analytic business applications
Rapid development of new data connectors to cloud-based platforms and applications
Alteryx Community introduces a new user experience to enable customers and partners to accelerate learning analytics, data science and share business outcomes. Highlights include:
New user experience to ease interactive learning and sharing of business outcomes
Personalized recommendation engine to help Community users get answers faster
A New Data Science Portal featuring AutoML, AI, and best practices in data science