What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Pioneering Enterprise Innovation: Appian's Journey in Low-Code AI and Data Fabric Integration
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Unlock the transformative potential of business with Mike Beckley, the visionary CTO of Appian, as we explore the fusion of low-code automation, AI, and data fabric technology. You're guaranteed to gain invaluable insights as Mike unpacks the complexities faced by large organizations when integrating cutting-edge AI into their workflows. From banks to healthcare firms, learn how Appian is pioneering a path for enterprises to innovate with agility, making informed decisions without the need to master the intricacies of data science. Get ready to understand how unified data systems are empowering businesses to achieve remarkable accuracy in AI applications, minus the hefty price tag of data migration.
Prepare to be transported to Appian World, where the excitement rivals historic events and every moment is a testament to innovation in action. Mike shares enthralling success stories from clients who've leveraged Appian's platform to overcome budget constraints and achieve impressive results. You'll hear how AI is evolving from a novel concept to a hands-on tool across sectors like education and procurement, enhancing efficiency and simplifying complex tasks. As we reminisce about the impact of retro computing and look forward to the future, this episode promises a compelling journey through the advancements that are reshaping how businesses and governments operate. Join us for tales of success and a glimpse into the future where low-code and AI are changing the game.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everyone, happy Friday. We made it through another week and I am really delighted to have this conversation today with Appian around low-code automation and business process reengineering with Mike Beckley. Mike, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm great, Evan. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. Well, thanks for being here. It's been well over a year since we've chatted and nothing's really happened in the industry, so I don't know what we're going to talk about.
Speaker 2:No, welcome yeah.
Speaker 1:But why don't we start with some introductions to yourself, co-founder at Appian, of course, and a little bit about your current mission these days?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm the chief technology officer at Appian and, like many CTOs, my mission is to incorporate artificial intelligence and large language models into your everyday work in a way that's actually valuable. So pretty boring stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a very simple overview of a pretty complex topic. Maybe dive a little deeper into your role in advancing this world of business process automation. Where do you sit in the landscape of different tools and platforms and your particular point of view?
Speaker 2:So Appian primarily services your most mission critical processes, and we work with the largest organizations in the world, so the banks that manage your money, the government institutions that regulate them, the major pharmaceutical firms, healthcare, life sciences companies that are inventing the therapies that we all rely on for our existence.
Speaker 2:And so Appian allows you to automate these really complex processes that drive our very complex modern world and civilization, where nothing can happen without a lot of oversight and regulation, where nothing can happen without a lot of oversight and regulation. And yet, to get anything done, we provide automation technology that takes care of a lot of the paperwork and the manual labor and the manual data entry and the swivel chair work gets eliminated with automated workflows that orchestrate humans, bots, ais, apis and takes that complex world and makes it something simple that humans can comprehend and govern and, more importantly, participate in and change. So it's about empowering people by showing them how work is being done, so that they can imagine how to make it better for their customers and for their employees and for their partners. And that's really our mission is to allow any individual to create with today's modern world, with technology, rather than just be a consumer of it, and to empower small teams to do extraordinary things.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's such an inspiring mission. Your feature set so diverse, pretty rich, but you've been really focused on AI. The last number of years, and particularly the last year, we've seen this massive push towards feature functionality enablement. Talk to us about some of the maybe recent developments over the last year and some of the benefits that you're bringing customers there, practically speaking, that you're bringing customers there, practically speaking.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Appian's major edge is that we provide a way to make things simple and powerful for you, and that includes AI and our data fabric. Technology is our patented technique which allows you to bring together all of your different enterprise data systems your different ERP systems, your HR system, your IT ticketing system, your CRM and actually use that information in a unified way, as if it was one data model, so that you can therefore apply AI to it and get a much more accurate search, lookup, summarization and even predictions. And so there was an easy way to kind of summarize Appian's unique value here. That was provided by a report from a large consulting firm whose name begins with an A, and they were saying that businesses aren't getting the value that they should from AI yet because they first need to modernize their ERP system and get all the data into the cloud. Appian simplifies that challenge for you with our data fabric, because now you can actually look at the information without migrating it into some new ERP system, which is going to take you many years and cost you a fortune in consulting right. So to be able to use the data fabric to actually access that information in real time, present it to an AI without having to migrate it. That's a huge value to people that allows them to get instant success. So that's the major difference with Appian.
Speaker 2:Also, because the world of AI is changing so quickly, if you're building your business processes and your applications dependent on one particular AI model, you get into a little problem.
Speaker 2:That AI model is going to be obsolete in days, not even months anymore.
Speaker 2:I mean the pace of innovation, the massive capital in the AI space means that we are constantly changing the AI models out, are constantly changing the AI models out, and every new AI model, every new generation of LLM, has its own instruction manual, its own inputs that it's expecting and its own rules for how you can prompt it to get the best result.
Speaker 2:And so those prompt manuals can run to book length. You know we're just using Cloud 3, anthropix's latest model, which is a lot better than Cloud, you know, previous generation or Cloud Instant or Cloud 2. And beats ChatGPT and a bunch of different metrics. And so you can either be forced to relearn that and reimplement AI every time, or you can use Appian or a product like Appian that takes care of all that for you. All you do is say all right. At this point, I want my user, when they ask a question like what is the right procedure I have to follow when I'm approving a drug that's going to be put on the market, show me where, in thousands of pages of procedures, I need to look at the right instruction and the right rule that's going to govern this decision.
Speaker 2:The human makes the decision, but the AI can help. You see the guidelines and framework into which that information feeds that decision, and so by letting Appian take care of constantly upgrading and improving the AI for you, we're able to deliver this tremendous value with AI and make it secure and responsible and auditable, and do that all without adding any code, and that's really sort of the magic of this. So getting into AI doesn't mean becoming a data scientist.
Speaker 1:No, it's very compelling, very powerful approach, and one of the things I love about listening to you guys is all the customer stories you have, which will be on full display at Appian World in a couple weeks, where I'll be Talk about some of those. Or pick one of your favorite children to talk about, whether it's NASA, various DOD agencies. You work with so many finance and insurance providers. What kind of stories will be on display in a couple of weeks?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're really excited to have you out at Appian World. You know it's going to be a fun time. You know, appian is headquartered in the Washington DC area in Northern Virginia and for the first time in many years, we're actually hosting Appian World near our headquarters at National Harbor, so that's going to be a lot of fun. You'll also see a lot more government stories on display obviously a huge customer footprint. We have over 200 public sector agencies and many of them will be presenting at Appian World in a special track just for our government clients, and we'll let you in there too.
Speaker 1:I have no clearance, so I hope that's not a problem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there'll be special conversations as well. Maybe I won't let you in on the Department of Defense breakfast that I'll be kicking off, but one of my favorite stories is one that was presented last year at Appian World in San Diego and that was Axiom Space. Axiom is one of these new generation of commercial space companies and instead of making rockets, they're making the new space station. They have the monopoly and the exclusive contract with NASA to dock with the ISS and take advantage of ISS's water and power. So it's a huge advantage for them. And they also have an even more interesting contract because America's returning to the moon, and that's what Starship is for is to return to the moon and all that SpaceX fun.
Speaker 2:But to go back to the moon we need a new spacesuit, and NASA had not created a new spacesuit in 50 years. So they Axiom is one of the two contractors chosen to create that new spacesuit is, you know, things can go horribly wrong or great or go great, because the spacesuit is a spaceship, is what it is, you know, and and uh, there was a. They were talking at Appian world about a famous incident where an astronaut was doing a spacewalk and and uh, you know, waters began to condense on the inside of the. You know waters began to condense on the inside of the, of the of the helmet. And you know, because no gravity, you know, or low gravity, you've got this problem of that water then can congeal on the face of the astronaut and drown them. And you know what seems like a trivial thing like, oh, just wipe the. You know helmet is a critical, life-threatening issue and you know, to troubleshoot that and figure out where that condensation is coming from and what to do about it, what of the many different settings and valves and decisions that an engineer can make to try and correct the problem? That's a very critical example of how having the right information at the right time is important to make a great decision.
Speaker 2:And so for Artemis, with the new spacesuit, nasa and Axiom are collaborating and they've created what they call the collaborative data environment using Appian's data, and so this allows Axiom to benefit from NASA systems and NASA's data from their long legacy of space. You know flight, human space exploration, and yet go at their own speed and use their own systems and do what NASA's paying the private sector to do. Go fast. And so you've got regulatory oversight from NASA, but you've got private sector innovation, and the data fabric allows both systems and teams to be able to collaborate in real time and then throughout that whole process, from manufacturing to testing, to deployment history, to actual maintenance schedules, and in flight. Now they're able in one place to track that suit, and so, if anything happens in another space walker, while the Artemis astronauts are walking on the moon, the mission control will have full access to all of that data in real time. They won't have to do swivel check, they won't have to go to 12 different systems, they won't have to figure out what could have gone wrong, and they can see exactly when this suit was last maintained and what parts were replaced. And they can start their troubleshooting in real time rather than having to wait hours or days to get to the answer.
Speaker 2:So that's, to me, my favorite example of what's going on, with how data fabric can allow an organization to innovate. But also in the real world we live in, in this complex society, doing real important things never happens alone. It happens with other stakeholders, it happens with government oversight, it happens with rules and regulations, and yet we want to be innovative, we want to unlock human potential, we want people to be able to invent, and so by not having to move all the data into one place before you can do anything important, by being able to treat remote data as if it was local data, by able to work with all these different microservices as if they were actually someone had done the years of work to put them together. You know, appian's patented data fabric technology makes it easy to take that complex world of data and make it look just like it's one database, one simple place to do your work.
Speaker 1:Wow, such a compelling story and switching gears to the, you know, commercial side of the house. I mean, you do a lot of work in very regulated industries financial services, insurance, health care. How does your work there compare to other industries that are maybe less regulated, unregulated? What's unique in those sectors? In those sectors?
Speaker 2:Well, what's unique is that, you know you have to consider all of the reasons why IT's backlog is so long. Right, they're trying to transform these businesses and industries. They're trying to, you know, take advantage of new revolutions like AI to discover new drugs and new therapies and life sciences, and yet, at the same time, you have to deal with a world which is so much more complicated. You have outsourced research labs and clinical trials are being done in facilities around the world. You have manufacturing facilities around the world. You have inputs to those production facilities, the precursor chemicals coming from all over the world, with very complex supply chain, and yet it all has to run like magic.
Speaker 2:And then into that world comes change, like COVID, disrupting supply chains or issues like Brexit. Remember a few years ago when the UK left the EU and suddenly all the rules for how stuff moved over national borders suddenly required tariffs and documentation? So this is the real world that industry has to live in. When they want to do something simple for you, like cure cancer, using technologies like Appian to model those workflows, monitor them in real time, handle exception cases and automate so much of that work. The humans can then focus on being creative.
Speaker 1:Well, what a great vision that is. Speaking of vision, maybe talk about your journey from co-founder on day one, day zero, through your current role as CTO. Tell us about that journey and your current vision, what you try to focus on within the company.
Speaker 2:You know, we founded Appian 25 years ago, 25 years ago 1999. So it's been. It's been quite a journey and, and you know, we three of us came out of a little local firm here in the DC area that's in the news again called MicroStrategy. My old boss there, mike Saylor, is now the Piper of Bitcoin. It's quite exciting to see him. You know, now that Piper, it's quite exciting to see him have his day in the sun again.
Speaker 2:But we we set out not to build a software company but to build a culture of innovation and that was really important to us. And I suppose you could say we were strange 25 year olds in that respect, when the rest of the world was busy trying to make money in e-commerce and sell pets over the internet or sell pianos over the internet or whatever goofy idea they had, because it was brand new internet commerce, brand new idea. So everyone thought they could get in on it. We thought, well, we wanted to build the kind of place where new ideas would get a hearing, where you'd want to go when you came out of school, where you get to work with really smart people, you'd get a chance to learn and innovate and you'd be empowered to make decisions and take risks, and so when we get together as founders I'm just one of these four founders that's what we argue about is the culture of working. Are we encouraging our best people to actually make an effective change? And we did that because you think about what was happening in 1999.
Speaker 2:While we were founding our company, we were watching on TV as Bill Gates had to testify in front of Congress and the Justice Department was prosecuting Microsoft under antitrust. And now Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world and Apple is being prosecuted for antitrust. And in our minds it was how do you build this institution that can be relevant in any era, that can constantly burn down old code and old business models to make way for the new? Because the one constant in technology is change. So if you build a business around one algorithm and technology has changed so if you build a business around one algorithm, you know and that algorithm is you know how to display software on a. You know Mac SE 30, well, your, your, your time horizon, your window of opportunity is pretty short, because you know that next product, that next computer is going to come along and make you obsolete, and so we wanted to teach people how to invent and then really get out of the way and let them do amazing things, and so it's been quite a journey along the way.
Speaker 2:You know, appian has become a global firm, even though we still do most of our software development right out of our headquarters in Northern Virginia. We've now got global development centers in Berlin for process mining and robotic process automation in Spain. We've opened up in Japan and India, and so it's really obviously been a great journey becoming a public company. We were the first company to actually introduce the concept of low-code to the world with our initial public offering in 2017. So it wasn't like we were an overnight success, although we've been in the media and getting attention and influencing the software market for 25 years. We definitely got a lot of attention on us, but it's been a slow burn in terms of building up this multi-billion dollar business value, and yet for me it feels like the blink of an eye, right Partly because I'm from Chicago.
Speaker 2:Being a Cubs fan, you know 10 years to IPO is nothing compared to waiting until 2016 to get our World Series.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of my journey, if you will, and in there I had a heart transplant 14 years ago, so it's been remarkable to see how, you know, modern technology has enabled me to prosper and thrive in this environment and and that's really an honor for me to be able to serve my life sciences clients who make the, you know, the drugs that keep me, keep me going and allow me to be healthy, and and so I, you know I very much see the real world impact of what we do.
Speaker 2:But now for the, you know, the issue is what do we do about the next 25 years? And that's why I think that that our, our data fabric technology and our new next generation process engine, uh, will unleash potential that, uh, you know, has been sort of buried in people for so long, because computing and and software development became so complex and, uh, it became the the purview of just it. Now it has an opportunity to to provide business with the tools to do some extraordinary things, governed and regulated by IT's wise guidance, and IT can do extraordinary things with their expertise now without having to be held back by some of the complexities of DevSecOps.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's an amazing journey you just outlined, and you kind of glossed over the fact that you had a heart transplant. I know you've been very vocal and open about it, which is phenomenal, and you're sort of a patient advocate in that area. So I can't wait that Appian world to hear more about your work in health, it and transforming a sector that needs so much change and transformation for good. So well done there. What else are you looking forward to at Appian World? What can one expect? Like myself, this is the first time I'll be at Appian World. What should I anticipate from the big day, or big week?
Speaker 2:Well, before I talk about Appian World, I'm just going to point out, I mean, yeah, heart transplant is interesting, but the Cubs winning the World Series I think that was more surprising and more rewarding and certainly a lot more fun to have been out there, you know, in Wrigley Again, that was great. Can't wait for opening day this year. So as for Appian World, april 15th to 18th at National Harbor, you can expect thousands of people. You can expect a global audience. You can expect clients from Australia, clients from Spain, clients from all over coming and sharing their stories about how they've done really extraordinary things with very, very limited budgets. You know, appian allows you to not just build an application but to run a portfolio of hundreds of applications and mobile apps and business processes. You know, and do it with a handful of people and that's the leverage. That's what comes when you don't need to write pro code to do the work. It's nothing against pro code, it's just it's expensive and the people who wrote the code have to maintain the code. And while AI is making it easier to write more code, if that isn't built on a foundation of a low-code platform to govern it all, then you're creating more tech debt and more issues to follow up on later.
Speaker 2:So I think what you're going to see at Appian World are some more remarkable stories. Like we got from Axiom Space and other great brands last year, like Pacific Life, I think we'll have even better stories this year because what you're going to see on display is AI has gone from this shocking new, exciting thing with LLMs to incredibly practical value, and it might be boring to some people to discover that you can suddenly scan accurately all these different invoices of every different format and type from all the different broker dealers that might be in your network, who all have their own desire to have their own graphic designers put their brand logo font in a different shape and basically hide the invoice number and the account number and the balance that you need to pull from it. But AI has made that all so seamless and Appian has made it easy to accurately train your own AI model without being a data scientist. And, of course, with Appian's private AI, it's always your model. You get to keep it, your insights you get to keep those two but also the way LLMs are being used in in responsible ways to deliver incredible value and benefits.
Speaker 2:I mean you know you'll see some great stories from universities helping students on track, helping students succeed and helping student advisors come up to speed on student bodies of thousands of students who they need to track and follow and pull together all the data with the data fabric to actually accurately know what's challenging a student. Is it their financial situation? Is their family going through a medical crisis? Are they having problems in school with their grades? Do they need social support? Are they having health problems? To provide effective assistance and build trust with a student to be able to do that well, that means being able to actually have the right information in front of you, and so that's just one good example.
Speaker 2:I think also, you know a lot of what the government does is buy stuff, and you'll hear some fantastic stories about how AI is helping cut through the red tape of government bureaucracy so that the government can more actively purchase things to support their mission, and how billions of dollars of acquisitions are now being automated and accelerated with AI to improve the quality of the requirements that go into that decision, so they buy the right thing for the right price, making sure that vendors are held accountable for performance and delivery. You know all these, all of these things that you know, we don't really think about day to day, but are so critical to how, how government can actually deliver and get value from our taxpayer dollars.
Speaker 1:Well said Well, so much inspiration, so much insight. I can listen to you all day, Mike, but sadly I have to let you go. And by the way, as a computer geek, retro computer lover, I couldn't help but notice your working Mac in the background. That's quite a piece of hardware. And I see it's got the screensaver running. What a beauty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that Mac SE30 with After Dark. Those flying toasters, Gotta love those. You know, there's an Apple IIc behind me as well.
Speaker 2:And a lot of the video games from the 1980s that inspired me to get into computers in the first place. You know things created by, like Richard Garriott, origin Systems, the Ultima series, these video games that were open ended that encouraged kids to explore and to try things and interact with their environment and empowered me as a child. In the same way I'm trying to empower adults and so, yes, I like to be reminded of these things.
Speaker 1:They're fun memories. We have that in common very, very fond memories. So I can't wait to meet you. We'll see you at Appian World and thanks everyone for watching. Reach out to Mike and to Appian. They put out so much great content, educational content, and I can't wait to get it all in in a couple of weeks at Appian World. Thanks, mike, thanks everyone All right, see you soon, evan.