Software and apps rule the world today, and for your business to succeed, it has to keep pace with the trend. But designing and launching a new solution takes time and money. Can a modest start-up or a business with a variety of needs get solutions quicker and more affordably? The answer to this challenge is low-code AI — a game-changer in artificial intelligence simplifying the regular app development tasks and bringing software development closer to users.
With low-code AI, even non-professionals can create apps in no time, modifying and updating them on the go to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Here we dwell on the subject of low-code AI to clarify how it works, what pros and cons it brings with it, and how businesses and data scientists can tap its potential. We also provide a ready checklist for picking a low-code AI solution that fits your needs ideally.
What Is Low-Code AI?
Programming languages differ in their complexity and the amount of software developer’s preparation needed to craft a more or less sophisticated app. However, all of them share one feature — professional preparation is needed, and a layperson far from programming can hardly make a viable program. AI is a narrow high-tech niche of programming requiring even more in-depth knowledge of coding and technology. Thus, AI development has traditionally been associated with advanced tech skills, professional software engineering education, and months of expensive, hard labor.
Low-code AI has changed the vision of AI product development by offering simple, intuitive, and user-friendly solutions. Low-code AI development platforms emerged to give ready-made building blocks for creating AI solutions, with the users crafting apps in hours with the help of GUIs and configuration instead of hand-written code. Sounds like magic, right? Let’s take a closer look at how this works.
Low-Code vs. No-Code AI
As their names suggest, low-code AI development still requires some minimal input of programming effort from the user. No-code software, in turn, does not require programming at all, allowing even users with zero programming experience to tailor the AI applications to their needs with the use of simple building blocks.
How Does It Work?
low-code AI can be created by people with scarce knowledge of coding. Thus, even regular users without professional training can quickly compile the needed low-code AI product with visual building blocks. The infrastructure of most low-code AI platforms includes the following elements.
#1. Graphical User Interface (GUI)
An intuitive GUI understandable even to non-specialists, equipped with clear visual elements, allows easy construction of AI programs with no puzzles over the input and output.
#2. Integrations
For the created program to work with your business data, it has to access your enterprise’s database. Low-code AI platform creators take care of this with APIs, letting the new program communicate with the database safely and efficiently.
#3. Application Manager
Creating an app with a low-code AI platform is not the end of the software development process. For the app to work well, it needs to be maintained and updated correctly. Besides, the platform via which you create the app commonly offers the troubleshooting service to help you eliminate bugs and improve the app’s functionality.
The transformative potential of low-code AI development is indisputable. Such solutions help businesses reduce the app’s time to market, allow substantial cost savings on hiring a software development team, and offer the speed, simplicity, and flexibility of ready-made software solutions.
- The ease of low-code software creation is a business benefit bridging non-technical specialists and AI products.
- The speed of app creation minimizes the time-to-market and maximizes business revenue.
- The flexibility of low-code solutions allows hassle-free customization of apps by choosing from the number of options available on the platform.
However, no matter how optimistic the introduction of low-code AI development may sound, it still comes with some limitations. For instance, this development type still comes with limited customization opportunities, with a finite number of building blocks that can be included in your app. The flexibility of low-code AI products is also restrained by the limited number of features available on the platform. Migration issues are still present, especially if you develop an app on a low-code AI platform and then migrate it to your existing ecosystem with a different code. Some providers don’t allow app migration, meaning that you are locked into the use of a specific platform as long as your app is in use.
Low-code and no-code AI products make data science more accessible to people, without the need for hiring a data scientist full-time.
However, these fears can’t be further from the truth as low-code AI platforms themselves represent a huge, unharnessed potential for data scientists to advance their careers. By investing their time into creating new customizable low-code and no-code AI solutions, data scientists of all experience and qualification levels can move an entirely new industry niche forward. Added services, such as more customization with premium subscriptions or data science training, are also expected to enjoy the ever-increasing demand. Thus, low-code AI technology is more of an opportunity than a challenge for the profession.
As you can see, businesses may reap numerous benefits from utilizing low-code AI solutions. The benefits come from massive cost cuts on development, quicker time-to-market for their software, better data analytics, better user experience, etc. However, critics of low-code and no-code solutions often claim that such products are severely limited with the provider platform’s features, thus offering minimal real customization. Datrics has embraced this problem by offering flexible business-focused solutions. The current functionality of the Datrics platform enables its usage to construct intellectual systems for retail and credit scoring businesses. Besides, it offers broad customization solutions by using a large number of data processing, analytics, and machine learning libraries. Thus, with the help of Datrics, businesses may indeed achieve the level of customization they need, with the business problem, not the system’s limitations, representing the cornerstone of cooperation.
Here are a couple more use cases to better understand how low-code AI development is applied today.
The MVP is made with a minimum investment of time and effort to visualize the idea’s implementation and see whether it meets the client’s expectations. Low-code AI development platforms also enable the MVP creation feature to minimize the development-to-launch turnaround and help users understand what other features and functions are needed.
We live in the era of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) apps gaining momentum. Thus, tapping the potential of this new market is key to business success. Instead of investing all your money into expensive hardware and software for such technology development, you may opt for multi-experience development platforms to create such products more cost-effectively. Some popular examples of such platforms include Firebase and GeneXus, helping users with innovative product creation in record time.
Technology should serve your operational efficiency goals, and that’s what the low-code AI development can also give. Think of your business’s automation needs and design a simple yet powerful AI app to meet those needs. For instance, Appian is a globally known low-code automation platform. Datrics also offers handy and affordable low-code AI development services supercharging your business operations. With Datrics, users without in-depth programming skills can create data processing pipelines from blocks in a drag-and-drop manner, coming up with ready-to-use ML apps in hours. Datrics solutions have already proven highly efficient in credit-risk for FinTechs and fraud detection, among other use cases. Thus, with 5x faster deployment of Datrics models (one week on average) and 5 ready-made template pipelines for industry use cases, the company is one step ahead of the competitors in terms of its low-code and no-code data science solutions.
So, is the implementation of AI financially viable? Most experts believe that it is, with low-code AI products able to maximize the ROI of your efforts in record time. McKinsey evaluates the future business potential of data analytics integration in business operations at $9.5–15.4 trillion annually, with AI solutions accounting for about 40% of that revenue growth.
As soon as you decide to move on with AI solutions, the time comes to choose the platform. The choice is broad, with hundreds of providers promising beneficial terms and positive user experiences. Here is the checklist to use before making the final choice:
- The pricing plan (the price should be much lower than hiring a tech specialist in-house)
- Flexibility (the number of features to choose from when creating and customizing your product)
- Safety (most platforms work in the cloud, so the security of your app and data it uses is critical)
- Migration policy (the possibility to migrate the created app to your system)
- Citizen vs. developer platforms (choose the platform depending on who will do the app)
- Maintenance (make sure to choose the platform offering maintenance and regular updates to make the process of app use hassle-free)
- User interface (while low-code platforms are super-friendly to non-tech users, they still require some coding and customization, so it’s better to choose those with a straightforward GUI)
- Customer support and training (the platform should offer sufficient training and troubleshooting resources, as well as 24/7 support, for you to get help whenever you need it)
Here’s all you need to know and consider before joining a low-code AI development platform. Enjoy the benefits of tech progress at your fingertips and bring your business operations to a whole new level with tech innovation. Getting an advanced AI product to serve your business needs has never been that simple.