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Chatter is now abundant about the power of AI and low/no-code solutions, and how those tools can help just about anyone create the next startup or pivot a business on a dime with limited investment.
With the promise of saving time, resources and money, investments in AI and low-code solutions are booming. 360 Market forecasts them to reach a compound annual growth rate of 31% by 2028, and a recent McKinsey report says they could add $4.4 trillion in value to the economy by “helping developers code more quickly and with reduced friction while enabling automatic translations and no- and low-code tools.”
Illustrating that growth, London’s Builder.ai recently raised a $250 million Series D funding round, as VCs see gold in the likes of Builder Studio and similar products and services. That comes after recent backing for Builder.ai from Microsoft, and the CEO’s stated ambition to develop a trillion-dollar business.
But it isn’t just startups that are benefiting. Big business has also tapped into the value of low-code and AI, pouring investments into various solutions to deliver high-value results.
Luxury Carmaker Test Drives Low-Code Solutions
Rolls-Royce’s Civil Aerospace division has made good use of the low-code features of Microsoft’s Power Apps to deliver value and drive change from within the business.
And today, as Rolls-Royce battles headlines warning of the company’s risk of major redundancies, anything that drives growth and sustainable business will help the new CEO, Tufan Erginbilgic, with his goal of transforming Rolls-Royce into a high-quality and competitive business with a strong balance sheet and growing profit, cash flows and returns.
To further encourage innovation, the company provides four-day training courses on Microsoft tools to its employees. The goal is to build a culture focused on embracing low-code techniques that can improve productivity, support research and development, and better disseminate data across sectors.
At a time when many look to cutbacks and buybacks to maintain value, some experts say it may not be long before analysts start asking how AI and low-code can boost the bottom line.
Related Article: What Are Low-Code/No-Code Platforms?
Low-Code Takes Over Hard-bent Industries
Over in the finance industry, low-code and AI are proving they can impact the seemingly impenetrable and dense layers of insurance interactions.
Take Pega’s low-code solution, which helped Dutch insurer Achmea. The company used a unified approach to inbound, outbound, owned and paid channels, creating dynamic customer dialogues. During each dialogue, the Customer Decision Hub provides a personalized next-best-action recommendation to maximize customer and business value.
The approach created an 85% save-rate when using next-best-action recommendations, along with a 27% increase in online upsell and cross-sell — and a 41% web-to-call center conversion rate.
Even legacy industries such as the steel industry can benefit from low-code. Italy’s Omicron Components, for example, is using Zoho Creator to corral its chaotic world of paper-based transactions. A prototype low-code solution created by IT proved the use case, and the company soon after launched a completely automated way to handle its steel trading processes end-to-end.
As a result, back office productivity rose by 35%, according to the case study, with error-free transfers and no loss of data, highlighting the power of low-code to help companies modernize and create platforms for more efficient business.
While those are solutions built using big-name vendor products with a focus on measuring ROI, across the low-code cosmos, there are thousands of projects starting every day using open-source, free-to-use tools or those embedded in productivity apps. They will likely create untold benefits that don’t merit a case study, along with a few failures, but all adding to the global advancement of AI and low code.
Related Article: What It Takes to Scale Low-Code Efforts
Low-Code as a Growth Driver
CIOs and business leaders are increasingly looking to AI and low code to drive growth and save time.
According to a new WebCon “The State of Low-code” study, 85% of CIOs said low-code applications were either very important or mission-critical for their organizations; and 84% expect the importance of low-code to increase promptly.
Neither low-code or AI are, alone, panaceas for businesses looking to drive growth or do-more-with-less-resources. But together, they create a compelling driver to empower knowledge workers, experts and developers to create a growth engine or innovation hub for any company.
“In my experience, we see a 50-80% reduction in development time, increase in data quality and 20-30% cost avoidance are the basic metrics which clients have successfully achieved,” said Anima Verma, a cloud transformation leader and director at EY. “The more the clients get sophisticated and matured in the platform, the better the value spectrum and results.”
Related Article: How Digital Transformation Is Driving Low-Code/No-Code Growth
Low-Code’s Impact From Startup to Enterprise
Overall, the uses companies make of no-code low-code tools are diverse, from building field operations apps, custom CRMs and inventory management apps, to creating dashboards connected to multiple data sources, among many others.
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Jesus Vargas, founder of LowCode Agency, said how these tools are used often varies by company size.
He said startups, for instance, tend to use no-code and low-code to build their first version of their product — the MVP — to find the right market fit. “I've even come across VC firms that will NOT invest in startups if they're not using no- low-code for the PMF stage,” Vargas said, “They think that building full-stack solutions at this stage is a waste of money.”
Among established businesses, SMBs typically use no-code low-code tools to streamline operations and create efficiencies. In his opinion, Jesus sees no-code low-code as a way to democratize access to enterprise-grade solutions for smaller companies.
Vargas also sees enterprises using the tools to deliver pilots at speed, without requiring their at-capacity development teams to get involved. This allows them to test run the concept and only invest in a custom-code solution once the case has been made that it will be a viable and profitable solution.
