Appian unveils platform update with agentic AI & data fabric

Appian has announced enhancements to its platform with embedded agentic AI capabilities and new data fabric features to aid organisations in building, deploying, and scaling intelligent process applications.

The company's latest platform update introduces the beta launch of Agent Studio and the general availability of AI Document Center, alongside expanded data fabric capabilities for document management and semantic search across records and documents.

Agent Studio enables users to design and deploy AI agents with greater autonomy and improved contextual awareness. These AI agents are capable of reasoning through complex, multi-step tasks and can interact with multiple systems, such as updating records, sending emails, and responding dynamically to new inputs. The platform is designed to help developers create AI agents that not only execute tasks but also make informed decisions based on real-time data and business logic.

A key component of the update, AI Document Center, serves as an application for enterprise-grade intelligent document processing. It is engineered to handle complex document formats while maintaining high extraction accuracy and scalability for large-scale enterprise workloads. Century Fire Protection, a customer using the platform, has cited efficiency improvements after integrating the solution.

Alex Polyakman, Chief Financial Officer of Century Fire Protection, said, "Adding Appian AI into Century's AP management workflow has resulted in a more modern, controlled and efficient process, leading to significant benefits."

The update also includes smart search functionality, which utilises AI-driven semantic search technology to enhance the retrieval of records. Instead of relying solely on keyword matching, the new feature interprets user intent, uncovers connections, detects patterns, and surfaces related records. Through this, users can search across an organisation's entire data fabric, including text fields and documents attached to records.

With this release, generative AI agents can now be used within autoscale processes. Appian's Autoscale, part of its cloud offering, is designed for high-volume, high-throughput automation and dynamically adjusts process execution capacity according to demand. This autoscale capability is intended to help organisations respond efficiently to increased demand without the need for over-provisioning, providing a reported increase in capacity by 10 to 100 times.

Other enhancements to the platform's data fabric include native support for documents, allowing organisations to manage, relate, and secure documents using record types. This eliminates the need for folder-based document organisation and gives developers the ability to build more document-centric applications. Data fabric also now supports incremental synchronisations as frequently as every 15 minutes, with external data syncs supporting up to 20 million rows per record to facilitate more responsive applications.

Additional improvements to the user interface involve automatic integration of common form headers and wizard functionality in Appian UI, along with recommendations for modern user experience patterns. Forms generated from the data fabric are expected to benefit most from these updates.

Michael Beckley, Chief Technology Officer and Founder of Appian, commented, "AI works best in a process. Appian's process orchestration and data fabric provide the foundation needed to get real value out of AI while maintaining data security."

Appian has positioned these updates as part of its approach to improving business processes by integrating artificial intelligence, ensuring governance and accountability in their deployment and offering a framework for purpose-driven AI applications within enterprise environments.