As businesses and novice programmers alike strive to keep pace with rapidly advancing technology, low-code platform providers such as OutSystems Inc. are leading the charge in the race to utilize artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Off the back of this, Microsoft Corp. announced the further augmentation of its low-code product, Power Platform, with generative AI capabilities.
The journey of no-code and low-code tools has been a lengthy one. Over the last decade these platforms have provided users, who lack specialized knowledge such as finance and marketing employees, with access to websites, workflows and applications amongst other features. Low-code tools have gone a step further by enabling tech savvy users to access advanced features using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
This process of low-code development has increased in popularity due to technology leaders needing to deliver more with limited resources. Shamim Mohammad, chief information and technology officer at CarMax, stated that the company is already using low-code and no-code platforms for strategic growth. He believes integrating generative AI will further empower users to create better business tools and capabilities whilst freeing up valuable software engineering resources at the same time.
This is a view widely shared by many low-code platform providers and is backed up by the research and consulting firm Gartner Inc. The firm estimates that by 2026, 80% of users of these low-code development tools will actually be non-IT users, up from 60% in 2021. The global market for low-code development is projected to reach a value of $26.9 billion in 2023, a 19.6% increase from 2022.
Microsoft has made the move to invest billions of dollars in OpenAI, the company behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, with their low-code platform already utilizing the GPT-3 model. Bubble Group Inc. co-CEO, Joshua Haas, sees generative AI and low-code technologies as two converging sides of the same coin. Low and no-code tools allow for users to understand the results of sophisticated language models, and to able to communicate these results in plain English – a huge push for automation.
Despite this, many CIOs and IT leaders remain skeptical of implementing generative AI as it tends to provide inaccurate solutions. IT controls and management which are built into low-code platforms help to prove the value of their stand-alone code development dev tools. Park Industries have been using OutSystems’s low-code tool for two years, and have saved approximately $350,000 a year because of this.
In conclusion, low-code platform providers are beginning to incorporate generative AI in efforts to stay ahead of the competition and to offer better features and capabilities. The rising user base of low-code development tools reflects this move, as application development can now be realized by more people through the use of high quality language models.
