Combining AI and no-code for business app development

Generative AI and no-code development tools are dramatically changing the software landscape. Just as a new generation of business software is being built using AI, no-code tools place these powerful capabilities in the hands of a much wider audience than professional developers. This combination enables the best of both worlds for businesses, which can now create highly customized experiences and workflows with the speed and simplicity of off-the-shelf solutions.

How does a modern AI-native, no-code app development platform unlock this new era of business software? We’ll start with an overview, then take a close look at Creatio, an AI-native, no-code platform that puts business app development in the hands of business users themselves, allowing them to automate CRM and workflows.

Tapping AI and no-code for app development

A no-code development platform gives users of any technical level a variety of composable software elements and intuitive tools to assemble apps. No no-code platform will offer the entire set of ready-to-use building blocks for your vertical or specialized business — but it can get you 80% of the way there, and you can easily define and configure the remaining pieces that are unique to your business. Moreover, with the no-code approach, business users are empowered to use their unique business knowledge to create apps and process automations that are closely aligned with their business and usability needs.

Creatio No-Code PlatformCreatio

Through AI, a no-code platform can extend this user empowerment to all stages of the application life cycle—design, development, deployment and customization, governance, and ongoing optimization. For example, based on user requirements provided in natural language, AI can instantly pull up an appropriate app template, create a prototype out of existing UI components, and connect it with the corresponding data models and workflows, or optimize an existing process to improve target KPIs.

Moreover, a truly AI-native, no-code platform can provide agentic AI capabilities within your apps. Using natural language and no-code tools, users can set up AI agents as part of their apps that can autonomously execute end-to-end workflows, run customer interactions, and create personalized content.

The power of an AI-native no-code platform, therefore, consists in the integration of continuously advancing unified AI capabilities with the ever-expanding libraries of no-code components and tools. Together, AI and no-code promise to allow users to create richer apps and address a wider set of emerging AI-powered business use cases.

Creatio AI side panelCreatio

AI-native, no-code development with Creatio

Now let’s look at the app development process with Creatio, an AI-native platform designed to automate CRM and workflows with no-code. Creatio is built on a no-code, composable architecture, meaning that its components and features are customizable and extendable via graphical UI, configuration, or natural language input. Further, Creatio offers seamless, unified AI capabilities across predictive, generative, and agentic AI use cases.

App development in Creatio starts with a library of prebuilt components and templates based on the purpose of your new app. Users can either choose from available presets and composable apps, or they can write down their definition for a new app using natural language and let Creatio AI assemble the starting prototype.

App development using prebuilt templates
Creatio

AI-powered app prototype generation
Creatio

After using AI to kickstart the app development, the next step is to flesh out your prototype with all the necessary UI elements, corresponding data models, and workflow automation. This is easily done with the combination of no-code and AI.

Freedom UI Designer

Creatio’s Freedom UI Designer is a visual drag-and-drop UI editor that lets you create and set up fully responsive modern apps, including mobile apps. You can create UIs from prebuilt layout templates, such as pages with tabs and dashboards, and choose from hundreds of components, dashboards, and widgets to design unique user experiences that match your business goals.

The Freedom UI Designer unifies UI and business logic development under the same WYSIWYG approach, enabling users to easily set up business rules and data structures based on the UI elements and natural language input, as well as by automatically suggesting previously used data objects.

What users can build with the Freedom UI Designer
Creatio

Process Designer

Creatio also brings a 100% no-code user experience to business workflow automation. With Creatio’s Process Designer, users can model structured business processes and integrate them within their apps. There is also a Case Management Designer for non-structured processes, which are commonly used to set up all the stages of the user journey within the application.

Just as you can use AI for rapid UI prototyping in Creatio, you can also take advantage of Creatio’s native AI capabilities for workflow design. Creatio can create workflows from text descriptions and suggest workflow components as you step through the design process.

What users can build with the Process Designer
Creatio

AI Command Center

In addition to allowing users to draw on AI throughout the app development process, Creatio allows them to add AI capabilities — including predictive, generative, and agentic AI patterns — within their apps. For that, Creatio provides a tool called the AI Command Center.

The AI Command Center organizes your existing AI Skills — that is, AI-powered app use cases — and allows users to create new ones. New AI skills, like other parts of your Creatio-powered apps, are created via natural language input and a no-code UI. The AI skills become part of your Creatio AI assistant, which you can access in any part of your application

For example, when working with customer data, you may rely on the Data Enrichment AI Skill of your Creatio AI assistant and ask it to populate customer data from internal and external data sources. You may then take advantage of the Next Best Offer AI Skill and ask Creatio AI to create a list of personalized product recommendations for the customer based on the engagement history and other data. Finally, you can use some agentic AI skills, such as loyalty management, to ask Creatio AI to set up and run a personalized loyalty campaign for the customer.

You can create AI skills that are unique to your business’s vertical or business process. You aren’t limited in terms of the AI use cases that you can pursue. And AI skills can drive action through no-code workflows, which extend the impact of your AI to any number of systems and data sources. The more data, workflows, and assets you have unified under your AI-native platform, the more autonomous orchestration you can set up with AI.

New AI Skill creation via natural language in Creatio
Creatio

Creatio No-Code Playbook and Toolkit

Even with the most user-friendly tools, it can be intimidating for non-developers to get started — they often struggle with knowing how to organize the processes or roles across their organization to make their projects successful. To that end, Creatio has introduced a software development methodology adapted to the no-code era, called the No-Code Playbook. It features all the typical processes, project phases, team roles, and collaboration tools, tried and tested on hundreds of real-life customer projects.

No-Code Toolkit interface with interactive drill-down capabilities
Creatio

As AI and no-code technologies continue to make headway in the enterprise, platforms like Creatio promise to empower users to create the apps that they need, when they need them, without consuming IT resources or waiting for IT resources to become available. It’s a promise of faster innovation cycles where the proof is in the living product rather than documentation and code, and where AI automation puts adaptive and personalized experiences at the forefront of enterprise software.

Burley Kawasaki is global VP of product marketing and strategy of Creatio.

—

New Tech Forum provides a venue for technology leaders—including vendors and other outside contributors—to explore and discuss emerging enterprise technology in unprecedented depth and breadth. The selection is subjective, based on our pick of the technologies we believe to be important and of greatest interest to InfoWorld readers. InfoWorld does not accept marketing collateral for publication and reserves the right to edit all contributed content. Send all inquiries to doug_dineley@foundryco.com.