Alteryx works in generative AI for speedy analytics results

Analytics and data science vendor Alteryx is rolling ChatGPT and home-grown AI expertise into some of its core modules, with the aim of generating targeted, detailed reports at high speed.

Alteryx’s AiDIN engine will power three new features, according to a company announcement Wednesday. The first, dubbed Magic Documents, applies AI to Alteryx’s Auto Insights feature, creating contextualized data visualizations in several forms, including PowerPoint, email and more. Workflow Summary does something similar for workflow documentation, allowing AI to generate them on-demand, while the OpenAI connector opens the doors for end-users to use ChatGPT themselves to analyze their in-house data sets. (Users will still need their own ChatGPT accounts.)

The goal of AiDIN, according to chief product officer Suresh Vittai, is to bring Alteryx’s offerings more in line with what modern analytics and line-of-business teams need.

“The idea is that in an enterprise, different people want to consume different information in different ways,” he said in an interview. “[Customers] want to use generative AI technology.”

For a company that embraced the cloud slightly later than most — Alteryx’s first cloud-native tools weren’t released until early 2022, according to IDC senior research analyst Raymond Huo — the new capabilities are much in line with the company’s competition in the analytics space. Several, including Informatica and Tableau, have various types of GPT integration already, while others like SAS are yet to jump into the generative AI marketplace.

“The new announcements are all aimed at making advanced analytics and AI/ML more accessible for all users,” said Huo.

Part of the plan may have been to strike while the iron is hot — according to Huo, Alteryx has grown rapidly over the past 12 months, with BI revenues growing more than six-fold and overall revenue rising 60% in year-on-year terms. Despite the aforementioned late move to the cloud — the company’s overarching Analytics Cloud framework only went into general availability in February of this year — that segment of revenue already accounts for 15% of the company’s total, Huo noted.

All three released components of AiDIN are available as part of existing subscriptions at no extra charge, according to the company. Magic Documents is free to users of Alteryx’s Auto Insights product, while the OpenAI connector and Workflow Summary are now part of Designer product. All are available immediately.