AI can offer transformative business value. But you need the right combination of capabilities.
Appian is continuing its history of providing practical value to enterprises across industries with the new AI capabilities in our 24.2 release—from 11 new generative AI skills to use as AI agents in your mission-critical processes to the release of our Enterprise Copilot that gives users instant answers to user questions. This post will cover the latest enhancements to our AI offerings.
Appian’s newest generative AI skills
To reap the benefits of AI, you need to integrate it into your processes. AI agents—autonomous systems designed to perform specific tasks within a business process—make this integration possible. Appian AI Skills are AI agents that let you use low-code to design and deploy LLM prompts to your processes.
In our 24.1 release, we delivered the prompt builder AI skill. This skill allows anyone to engineer a generative AI prompt and then add it to a wider process. You simply tell the model what to do in natural language, provide input and outputs as guidance, and test your prompt to ensure accuracy.
Prompt builder gives you incredible flexibility in designing prompts for your AI agents. But not everyone wants to start with a blank canvas. We wanted to make the process even faster by giving you a starting point. So for 24.2, we're proud to release 11 new customizable AI skills for common use cases, including:
Summarizing text, emails, or documents
Detecting personally identifiable information (PII) from text, email, or documents
Extracting data from unstructured text, email, or documents
Classifying text for further processing and usage
Generating text and content
Selecting an AI skill
Editing an AI skill
How about a practical example? Let’s consider customer support automation. You can use AI skills to summarize text like inquiries or support tickets to quickly understand customer issues. Then, you can use the extraction skill to pull critical data like order numbers to enter into the system or summarize the email to the customer support rep. Finally, you can have the system generate a support email that a human can review prior to sending. Each AI agent will work on a specific task, then you can chain them together to simplify a greater workflow or process.
These new generative AI features stem from our strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services. Our work with AWS Bedrock enables us to use the latest LLMs to provide strong generative AI capabilities while maintaining our commitment to private AI.
Get quick answers with Enterprise Copilot
In addition to the new AI skills, we’re also excited to release our latest AI Copilot feature: Enterprise Copilot. This feature allows users to get answers without sifting through mountains of documentation. You can do this by creating a “knowledge set” in Appian that contains curated documents with critical information. The system then uses a form of prompt engineering known as “retrieval augmented generation” (RAG) to generate reliable answers to questions by “retrieving” information from real sources. In other words, it provides answers based on real information from your provided context—ensuring privacy and accuracy.
It’s easy to operationalize this. In Appian, you simply:
- Create a new knowledge set.
- Upload a curated set of business documents (such as HR policies or legal filings).
- Set permissions to ensure security.
Users can ask questions about the knowledge set and get an immediate answer.
For example, insurance organizations can upload policy documents and training manuals so representatives can get answers fast. Let's say someone gets a claims request, and they're unsure of a specific policy that might be relevant. The user can get key information from Enterprise Copilot about things like policy coverage, compliance regulations, and procedures needed to approve or deny the claim. Instead of combing through multiple documents, the rep gets answers in seconds. Plus, Enterprise Copilot returns answers with citations, so you can verify accuracy and reduce errors. To top it all off, Appian keeps your data private—there is no need to upload your sensitive data to a third-party vendor outside of your compliance boundary.
Gain insights with natural language
Build momentum with enterprise AI
As LLMs proliferate, people see the massive potential of AI to transform industries. Yet, too often, AI is used by individual employees as an assistant on ad hoc tasks. How can businesses see the true transformative benefits of AI?
The key is to combine AI with a strong foundation of data and process. Appian calls this “enterprise AI.” And data is the foundational element that makes enterprise AI possible. Appian's data fabric makes your data more accessible to AI models, and with our commitment to private AI, your data never leaves your compliance boundary.
Appian’s process management capabilities are also critical to making it possible to operationalize AI across the enterprise. By infusing AI agents into your end-to-end processes, you can see and measure efficiency and process improvement over time. And process orchestration supports mixed autonomy, or the concept of using AI to enhance human work. By passing work between AI agents and humans, you not only make both more effective, but you also ensure humans are in the loop on all decisions. With good processes, you can strategically embed AI throughout the organization.
What else is new in 24.2?
Appian 24.2 includes exciting new features across automation, data fabric, total experience, and more. In particular, we’re excited to release Appian Process HQ, which arms you with transparency into your processes so you can make data-driven improvements.
Get up to speed with our latest release by watching the webinar.
