Alteryx reimagines data analytics with generative AI

Irvine, California-headquartered Alteryx, which powers data analytics for more than 8,000 global enterprises, has debuted a generative AI engine called AiDIN.

Announced today at the Alteryx Inspire conference, AiDIN comes as part of the company’s cloud platform suite. It introduces multiple new LLM-powered capabilities aimed at helping enterprises drive actionable insights from data — while also ensuring high levels of productivity.

>>Follow VentureBeat’s ongoing generative AI coverage<<

The announcement marks the entry of another data ecosystem player into the world of generative AI. Companies like Honeycomb, Informatica, Kinetica and ThoughtSpot had already debuted generative AI features to target different aspects of data (from querying to management) in their own way.

How will AiDIN generative AI help?

AiDIN is an umbrella term for a series of generative AI innovations set to make their way into the Alteryx Cloud Platform portfolio of products. To start off, Alteryx said it is introducing three key accelerative features for enterprise users: Magic Documents, Workflow Summary and an OpenAI connector.

Magic Documents

With Magic Documents, the company is enhancing its Auto Insights offering to include automated summarization and delivery. Previously, the explanation of metrics’ movement generated by Auto Insights had to be manually communicated with the concerned stakeholders. With the new feature, Alteryx is automating the process of summarizing analytical insights in plain language and generating clear, concise communications for different mediums (presentations, emails, messages) and audiences. 

“Magic Documents works by connecting to OpenAI via the Microsoft Azure Cognitive services. An API call is executed each time an Auto Insights user clicks the ‘Generate’ button, resulting in content generation for the user,” Asa Whillock, VP and general manager for Alteryx machine learning, told VentureBeat.

“This saves users valuable time and effort, allowing them to focus on absorbing insights, planning actions and making data-driven decisions. The streamlined communication improves time-to-value, operational efficiency and decision-making capabilities for businesses,” he added.

Workflow Summary

While Magic Documents helps with communicating analytical insights, Workflow Summary for Alteryx Designer enables users to document their processes more effectively for governance and auditability. For this, the tool uses ChatGPT, which automatically generates concise summaries of a workflow’s purpose, inputs, outputs and key logic steps in natural language, along with the associated metadata.

“The Workflow Summary tool addresses the challenge of understanding and documenting complex Alteryx workflows, especially in scenarios where workflows are inherited from others, [during] server management transitions, or when revisiting old projects without proper documentation. It eliminates the need to open each workflow and manually analyze them,” Whillock explained.

Notably, to handle ChatGPT’s limitations in handling long texts, Alteryx developed strategies to convert workflow files into manageable text lengths. This involved selectively extracting relevant tool configurations, individually summarizing long tools and summarizing groups of tools or containers in a workflow. 

The OpenAI connector for workflows

Whillock said Atleryx Designer will also get an OpenAI connector to help teams implement generative AI into their data and analytics workflows targeting different use cases. For example, they could use it for labeling customer calls by product and sentiment, or for localizing audit logs into any local language. 

“These two examples barely scratch the surface, as Alteryx customers are already finding an amazing number of ways to apply LLMs to their Alteryx workflows,” Whillock added. 

The VP noted that companies have already shown an “unparalleled appetite” for capabilities that take repetitive tasks off their plates and that Alteryx will soon bring more capabilities to reimagine analytics in 2023 and expand what it offers under the AiDIN engine.

Currently, in the machine learning and analytics domain, Alteryx competes with multiple players, including Looker, Tableau, Qlik and Rapidminer. The company has raised a total of over $600 million over four funding rounds.