AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Appian AI Copilot Transforms Low-Code Development with Amazon Bedrock
By: Sunil Bemarkar, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By: Ian Lenora, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS
By: Philip Kang, Principal Solutions Consultant – Appian
By: Louis Prensky, Senior Product Manager – Appian
 |
| Appian |
 |
With the recent advancements in AI, organizations have more pressure than ever to boost efficiency and innovate faster. Integrating advanced AI services into business processes can enable this transformation, while accelerating application development by improving quality and compliance. Low-code platforms like Appian allow organizations to easily embrace the new paradigm, enabling rapid development with minimal coding.
This post covers how Appian’s AI Copilot, built on Amazon Bedrock, enhances low-code development by providing intelligent assistance, automating routine tasks, and enabling natural language interactions. Learn how business users and developers can leverage AI Copilot to boost productivity, collaboration, and innovation.
Background
Appian, an AWS Partner, provides low-code automation software that optimizes and streamlines complex business processes for clients across financial services, public sector, insurance, healthcare, and life sciences. Appian includes everything needed to design, automate, and optimize even the most complex processes. The world’s most innovative organizations trust Appian to improve their processes, unify data, and optimize operations. This leads to faster growth and superior customer experiences.
Appian leverages Amazon Bedrock’s robust infrastructure and Anthropic’s Claude large language models to power Appian’s AI Copilot, enabling developers to enhance and automate business processes using low-code development.
The Challenge of Modern Application Development
Teams face constant pressures to deliver applications faster. Traditional development approaches often involve complex coding, long development cycles, and specialized skills. This creates bottlenecks and slows innovation.
Low-code platforms solve these challenges by enabling developers to build applications through visual modeling and configuration. Furthermore, developers can use AI to automate tasks or provide assistance with optimizing workflows.
Appian AI Copilot, Powered by Amazon Bedrock
Appian AI Copilot, powered by foundation models (FMs) in Amazon Bedrock, is built directly into the Appian Platform assisting both business users and developers in common tasks. AI Copilot assists them do their jobs faster.
AI Copilot for business users
AI Copilot for business users helps users work more efficiently, improve their experience, and gain insights from organizational data. For example, the Records Chat component enables users to interact with data via a conversational AI interface. Users can synthesize information, understand case histories, and get suggestions or summaries without needing to craft perfect prompts.
AI Copilot also empowers users to gain real-time data insights, enabling them to uncover patterns, trends, and outliers. Data fabric integration enables users to query multiple datasets for better-informed decisions.
Additionally, AI Copilot assists in creating Appian process views more efficiently by suggesting attributes, details, and filters based on process data.
Another key feature is Enterprise Copilot (Figure 1), which provides a generative AI chat experience for accessing curated sets of business-specific documents. Using private AI models, it indexes files within knowledge sets, allowing users to gain deeper, more specific answers faster than using manual search (while protecting data security). This streamlines access, enhances analysis, and improves decision-making across business functions.
AI Copilot for developers
Developers can use AI Copilot to accelerate application development by streamlining planning, design, and development from requirements gathering to data modeling, UX design, and object generation.
Plus, AI Copilot generates realistic sample data for compelling demos and secure testing. It also automates test case creation for expression rules, suggesting new scenarios based on rule details and existing tests. This saves developers time and improves unit test quality with comprehensive, non-redundant scenarios.
Finally, AI Copilot can also help you generate interfaces directly from PDF documents. This feature allows developers to quickly build beautiful and intuitive user experiences with minimal manual input.
As shown in Figure 2, AI Copilot increases developer productivity and simplifies application building.
How Amazon Bedrock Enhances AI Copilot
Amazon Bedrock provides pre-trained, high-performance foundation models (FMs) for AI Copilot’s advanced features.
Key Features of Bedrock:
Amazon Bedrock offers a comprehensive suite of advanced features designed to enhance the AI experience. At its core, the platform utilizes sophisticated natural language understanding, allowing the AI Copilot to accurately interpret and respond to user inputs. Building on this foundation, Amazon Bedrock’s generative AI capabilities enable it to produce customized code and provide targeted recommendations that align with each user’s specific role and context. The platform’s performance is underpinned by AWS’s robust infrastructure, ensuring that Bedrock maintains consistent reliability and seamless scalability regardless of user demand levels.
Architecture:
Appian’s generative AI architecture (Figure 3) integrates both Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Textract’s scalable infrastructure with Appian’s process management capabilities. This architecture is designed with private AI as the foundation and ensures customer data is safe, private, and never exposed or trained on. If a customer site isn’t located in an AWS Region that supports a feature, customers can send their data to a supported Region as shown in the architecture of Figure 3.
The key components of this architecture include:
Appian AI Process Platform instances: The front end serves as the primary application environment where users interact with the system application to upload documents, initiate workflows, and view processed results.
Appian AI service: This service functions as an intermediary layer between the Appian instances and AWS AI services (Amazon Textract and Amazon Bedrock). This layer encapsulates the logic required to interact with the AWS AI services, managing API calls, data formatting, and error handling.
Amazon Textract: This AWS service is used to automate the extraction of text and structured data from scanned documents and images and provide the extracted data in a structured format.
Amazon Bedrock: This AWS service provides advanced AI capabilities using FMs for tasks such as text summarization, sentiment analysis, and natural language understanding. This helps enhance the extracted data with deeper insights and contextual understanding.
Benefits of using AI Copilot
With Appian, Users and administrators can focus on building value instead of maintaining and configuring connectivity. Embedding AI Copilot in your applications is easy, enabling fast development and easy access to users when they need it.
Key benefits for business users:
AI Copilot helps business user interact with and understand data, improving decision-making accuracy and reducing analysis time. Through its conversational AI interface, users can effortlessly navigate and synthesize complex information without needing to craft precise prompts, making data interaction more intuitive and accessible. The system provides real-time access to insights and automatically identifies patterns across multiple datasets. This empowers users to make well-informed decisions faster and with more confidence. Furthermore, by enabling quick access to answers from business-specific documents, the AI Copilot accelerates decision-making processes throughout the organization, streamlining operations and improving overall business efficiency.
Key Benefits for Developers:
AI Copilot transforms the developer experience by serving as an intelligent assistant that significantly enhances both productivity and code quality. Developers can reduce testing time through automated unit test generation, achieving thorough code coverage. The system continuously provides valuable recommendations for workflow optimization, standards compliance, and performance improvements, helping developers maintain best practices throughout their development cycle. Additionally, AI Copilot streamlines the development process by generating realistic synthetic data, enabling faster development and more effective demonstrations. Perhaps most significantly, it revolutionizes the prototyping phase by allowing developers to rapidly create application prototypes without writing code or navigating technical complexities, making the development process more efficient and accessible.
Customer Success
Appian’s AI Copilot powered by FMs in Amazon Bedrock has been instrumental for organizations across industries to streamline their operations and speed up development. Here’s just one example:
Transforming Academic Advising with AI-Powered Assistance
A leading university successfully transformed its academic advising services through the implementation of Appian AI Copilot’s records chat, addressing the critical need to reduce administrative burdens on advisors. The integration of this powerful generative AI assistant revolutionized the traditional advising workflow, yielding remarkable results across multiple dimensions.
The impact was immediately evident in the quality of student support. By eliminating time-consuming manual meeting preparations, advisors were able to increase their direct student interaction time by 50%. The efficiency gains were substantial, with the university recording annual time savings of up to 12,500 hours through streamlined prep and follow-up processes for student meetings. The AI-assisted platform enhanced decision-making capabilities, enabling advisors to deliver more personalized and timely support to their students.
What made this transformation particularly noteworthy was the speed and ease of implementation. The university successfully deployed the AI assistant within a remarkably short time frame of just two months, demonstrating the solution’s accessibility and practical applicability in an academic setting.
Conclusion
Appian’s AI Copilot, powered by Amazon Bedrock, marks an advancement in low-code application development and process improvement for both developers and business users.
- Business users can interact with data conversationally, gain fast answers to questions across business datasets, gain real-time insights, and make smarter decisions.
- Developers benefit from AI-assisted testing, optimization suggestions, and error detection, enhancing productivity and code quality.
Adopting these technologies keeps businesses competitive, driving innovation and efficiency organization wide.
Appian solutions are available as software as a service (SaaS) offering in AWS Marketplace. Check out the Appian website to learn more about how to use the AI Skills.
.
.
Appian – AWS Partner Spotlight
Appian is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Competency Partner that provides a low-code platform for building and automating business applications and workflows. It helps organizations streamline processes, improve customer experiences, and gain a competitive advantage by automating tasks, integrating systems, and providing real-time insights.