For the big-data firm Alteryx Inc., the past year has been all about capitalizing on the artificial intelligence wave.

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene in December 2022, some tech leaders expressed a belief that the future of generative AI would swiftly evolve to specific use cases that leveraged proprietary data in vertical industries. Generative AI applications can enhance organizational productivity, but that requires fine-tuning models with the right data to provide domain-specific insight.

This has provided Alteryx with an opportunity to take advantage of its 27 years in analytics and develop a set of tools for enterprise customers to use in leveraging generative AI. At a time when the novelty has worn off from last year’s rush into AI and IT organizations are looking for budget-minded ROI, Alteryx is moving into 2024 by providing a framework for how businesses large and small will use the rapidly advancing, powerful technology.

“The idea of an industry or use case-specific solution is to accelerate the deployment of the technology for these industry and use case-specific needs and thereby speed time to value,” said Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., in an exclusive interview with SiliconANGLE. “Companies often aren’t sure where to begin when trying to become more predictive and proactive, so companies like Alteryx are giving them starting points for common use cases.”

This feature is part of theCUBE’s AI special coverage ahead of Alteryx Inspire. (* Disclosure below.)

New engine for Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform

Over the past year, those starting points have been focused on providing new automatic insights features and no-code tools for use by novice AI users in the creation of generative AI-powered applications. In May, the company introduced a new machine learning and generative AI engine for its Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform to accelerate customer productivity. The launch included release of Alteryx AiDIN, a combination of analytics outputs with large language models to generate smarter, in-context data visualization summaries and document business processes in natural language.

“Data operations is an area that hasn’t shown a great deal of innovation lately,” said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research, in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “As such, it’s nice to see Alteryx coming up with a genuinely new use case that leverages the capabilities of generative AI to help business users better understand data-driven insights. It’s a promising new feature that many will feel is worth exploring.”

Alteryx followed up its May launch with another release in October that introduced what the company announced as one of the industry’s first deployment-agnostic interfaces purpose-built for no-code users to leverage generative AI.

Powered by Alteryx AiDIN, the new Alteryx AI Studio lets users select a large language model of choice from an available list and tune it using their own custom business data. Another feature, Playbooks, provides a path to faster and easier insights from data using generative AI.

The latest release from Alteryx demonstrated how the company was taking an aggressive approach in deploying its generative AI strategy to meet a need for leveraging proprietary data.

“It has to do so, because generative AI technology is moving the bar quickly on data preparation and low-code application development,” Henschen noted in an interview last fall with SiliconANGLE.

Industry-specific use cases emerge

Alteryx’s focus on data preparation and low-code tools is helping pave the way for a growing number of industry-specific use cases in the generative AI sphere. Automation of key data preparation and analytics processes have broadened the use of AI across industries and a wide range of stakeholders.

At the multinational ecommerce giant eBay Inc., the Alteryx Analytics Cloud was used to train 50 non-technical employees in the use of AI and building machine learning models. The result was an improvement in the company’s checkout feedback process to spot problems and predict solutions before a human stepped in.

In the healthcare arena, Alteryx is working with organizations such as Health Care Program Advisors to provide more detailed data analysis for hospitals and health systems. What is noteworthy about Alteryx’s involvement with HCPA is how the healthcare consulting firm has combined Alteryx with other business intelligence tools, such as Snowflake and Tableau, to drive real-time insights and create visualizations for a revenue monitoring project.

In December, Alteryx announced the formation of a public sector entity to support U.S. institutions in the use of data analytics and AI. Along with providing analytics services for public sector clients, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the State of Washington, Alteryx has formed a partnership over the past year with the Department of Defense to help active-duty service members transition to civilian careers.

The company’s work with organizations across multiple sectors speaks to the need for analytics to support industry-specific use cases. Alteryx and other firms in the data preparation field are positioned as both horizontal and vertical providers, according to Henschen.

“Alteryx and competitors, such as DataRobot, Dataiku, RapidMiner and SAS, are, first and foremost, horizontal technology providers, offering data prep, analytics and data science technologies that can be applied across any industry, but they also use that technology to build industry-specific and use-case-specific solutions,” Henschen told SiliconANGLE. “These solutions provide 80% or more of what’s needed for industry- and domain-specific use cases, in the form of prebuilt data connectors, schema, models, reports and dashboards, and ways to build predictions into action-driving workflows.”

Democratization of AI for domain experts

Rapid adoption of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, has fueled a democratization of the technology across industries over the past year, a trend that Alteryx noted back in 2022. The company commissioned an IDC Infobrief that identified a need for prioritizing democratization of data and analytics among organizations in all industry sectors.

While 70% of organizations wanted to be more data-driven, 88% of respondents still faced technology constraints in making that happen, according to the report. Availability of generative AI to domain experts instead of data scientists, and a growing ecosystem of tools surrounding the technology, have helped overcome roadblocks for data-driven deployments.

“Domain experts are really in the best position,” said Alan Jacobson, chief data and analytic officer at Alteryx, during an interview with SiliconANGLE. “They know where the gold is buried in their companies. They know where the inefficiencies are. It is so much easier and faster to teach a domain expert a bit about how to automate a process or how to use analytics than it is to take a data scientist and try to teach them to have the knowledge of a 20-year accounting professional or a logistics expert of your company.”

Industry-wide interest in AI has also led to major changes for Alteryx itself. The company was acquired by private equity firms Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners in December for a reported $4.4 billion. In late January, Alteryx appointed Kevin Rubin, the company’s chief financial officer, as the interim CEO following the departure of previous CEO Mark Anderson.

Alteryx has also been active in pursuing a number of industry partnerships to strengthen its position in the competitive data analytics industry. The company achieved Google Cloud Ready – AlloyDB designation in May and has expanded its relationship around Looker Studio, Google’s interactive data visualization tool. More recently, Alteryx announced an expanded partnership and product alliance with Databricks Inc. and its Data Intelligence Platform.

Rapid adoption of generative AI has pushed companies such as Alteryx into the spotlight as businesses look for ways to capitalize on what the powerful technology can provide. Alteryx’s combination of analytics and automation has captured the attention of companies seeking to leverage AI and gain benefit in the global marketplace.

“The ROI with analytics and automation is incredibly high,” said Alteryx’s Jacobson during a conversation with SiliconANGLE. “Companies are having a ton of success. What we see again and again, company after company, government agency after government agency is how analytics are really transforming the way that work is being done.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Alteryx Inspire. No sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: This image was created with the assistance of AI