The convergence of analytics and AI, including prescriptive AI, is reshaping industries, offering unprecedented opportunities for innovation and growth. It’s becoming clear that as data becomes more accessible and technology advances, data-driven insights can help drive valuable outcomes in organizations.

Organizations have taken note. According to a survey from big-data firm Alteryx Inc., 82% of business leaders agree that AI is significantly impacting organizational goals, while 46% of board members state generative AI is their top priority above all else.

In recent months, Alteryx has been seeking to capitalize on that wave. It’s why the company has been focused on putting data in AI to work for people and to accelerate the time to value for that data and AI capabilities in order to meet business goals, according to Paula Hansen, president and chief revenue officer of Alteryx.

“This is a time where everybody’s asking, how do we combine the power of generative AI, which is highly valuable, with predictive AI and with prescriptive AI?” Hansen said during a recent interview with theCUBE Research analyst John Furrier. “We not only want to learn what’s happening today, but we want to combine that with knowledge to say, ‘What could happen tomorrow and what decisions and actions should we take prescriptively as a result of all this knowledge?’”

What might that look like? For Alteryx, the future will be defined by a set of new products and processes, with the goal of combining predictive and prescriptive AI to innovate in the enterprise.

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

Alteryx transitions while advancing prescriptive AI innovations

Late in 2023, Alteryx signaled its approach amid a time when it found its stock under significant pressure. The company had posted a net loss of $120 million overall, which had risen from a loss of $107 million one year earlier. But amid the challenging conditions, the company made it clear that it was focused on continuing to innovate. It announced Alteryx AiDIN at Inspire 2023, which brought a number of generative AI capabilities to its flagship platform, the Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform.

“As we look to the second half of 2023, we are reinforcing our commitment to improving profitability, while also sustaining a high pace of platform innovation with Alteryx AiDIN, our generative AI and machine learning technologies, as well as cloud-connected technologies,” said Mark Anderson, who was chief executive officer of Alteryx at the time of the stock pressure in August 2023.

Since that period of time, Alteryx has been through a major transition. In January, Alteryx appointed Kevin Rubin as the company’s interim chief executive officer after Anderson stepped down as CEO and from the company’s board of directors to pursue other opportunities. And an acquisition of Alteryx by Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners was completed in March.

But though the company has been evolving, it has continued to reveal more information about its AI strategy. In December 2023, the company launched its no-code AI Studio to simplify the development of generative AI applications. And at Alteryx Inspire 2024, the company pulled back the curtain even further on its plans for prescriptive AI and other advancements. The event included demonstrations of new features, particularly around AI and machine learning, tied to Alteryx’s cloud platform.

“When you start to look back at it, they really have a very loyal following, a very big sense of community,” said Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst with theCUBE Research. “There was a lot of discussions about how people were using this to get to AI and to get to ML.”

Alteryx navigates the competitive AI platform market

When it comes to where Alteryx is positioned in the market, the company can be viewed as a data prep, AI and ML platform that complements data platforms such as Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks and Google BigQuery, according to Doug Henschen, vice president and principal analyst of Constellation Research Inc. But that position presents both advantages as well as challenges.

“The advantage is that Alteryx can help data engineers and data scientists no matter what data platform they are using,” Henschen told SiliconANGLE in an interview for this story. “The disadvantage is that every one of those data platform vendors is trying to present their own solutions for most of what Alteryx provides, whether that’s Amazon Sagemaker, Snowflake Cortex, Databricks AI/ML/GenAI capabilities, or Google Vertex AI.”

The market around AI platforms is highly competitive, to say the least. In addition to facing stepped-up competition from those platforms Henschen mentions above, Alteryx continues to face strengthening competition from more traditional competitors, including Databricks, Dataiku, Data Robot, H2O.AI and others, Henschen added.

“Alteryx made an interesting push into process automation a couple of years ago that entailed partnerships with RPA vendors, and I thought it would be promising,” he said. “I hope they stick with it, because insights, predictions and recommendations lose value if they don’t quickly drive action. Data, insights and AI have to be actionable if they are to add value, and Alteryx is in a cloud- and app-agnostic position to put them to use within heterogeneous environments.”

Alteryx outlines goals for its broad AI capabilities

For Strechay, what Alteryx Inspire 2024 revealed most was the breadth of the product line the company showed on its cloud platform. In particular, the company did a solid job when demonstrating demos, including DoorDash Inc.’s innovative application of Alteryx’s tools.

“Bringing that string through of truth with DoorDash and showing how you would get and use this data in, I would say, a created use case that they took people through in three different steps, with three different demos, I thought that was awesome,” Strechay said.

As Hansen, president and chief revenue officer of Alteryx, told theCUBE, the ultimate goal is to combine the power of generative AI with predictive AI and prescriptive AI. Alteryx believes it is uniquely positioned to help companies help put the power of generative AI to work.

“I think everyone understands that for AI to really unleash its magic, it’s really dependent on the state of your data as well,” Hansen said. “Alteryx is happy to live at the confluence of both the power of AI, as well as the requirements of your data to make AI work.”

Data needs to be prepped, cleaned and made available for rich analytics for AI to do its job. The company sees a new way forward in this area, Hansen pointed out.

“We are really excited about how all of these trends are converging together in this time of data and AI, and we are committed to our customers to help them unleash that power,” she said.

The bottom line here is that every person and every function of every enterprise has an opportunity right now. That opportunity is to contribute to business goals of increasing productivity and driving growth, hansen added.

“An individual’s ability to do that is squarely in their hands with the upskilling they can do to leverage their data, to turn that into insights, to put AI to work for them to drive those productivity goals … to me, this is a time of great innovation,” she said. “It’s a time where literally every person has an opportunity to participate in this transformation of data AI. We couldn’t be more excited.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Alteryx Inspire event. Neither Alteryx Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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