Everyone wants to get business analysts involved with AI—enterprises, startups, investors, and the analysts themselves. Companies that embed AI in their core processes will gain billions in increased revenue and reduced costs. But a shortage of 100,000 data scientists in the US alone means there’s an opportunity for business experts to contribute to these efforts—if they have the right tools. VC’s have poured $700 million into no-code AI companies over the past 18 months to help deliver such tools.

The results have been underwhelming.

Productive AI projects need to start with data and end with insights delivered to business applications. A no-code AI product should facilitate this entire pipeline, from data to ML to productizing outputs, and should enable end users to scale compute and storage as their data and models grow.

Most no-code AI products address just one piece of that workflow (e.g., AutoML, model ops, feature engineering). Those that claim to provide everything you need to deliver true and actionable no-code AI insights are typically just collections of point solutions cobbled together to form unwieldy “platforms.” And none of those let analysts scale projects without help from IT.

Teams that attempt to use these so-called platforms face many challenges, among them—

  • Individuals can’t succeed. Working with a range of solutions makes life painful for analysts. They have to evaluate a myriad of products before getting started. They have to learn how to use every single point solution they buy. And once they’ve ready to get started they have to navigate a string of products to build each workflow—with all the painful data duplication and risk for error that implies.
  • Teams can’t collaborate. Anyone who has tried contributing to a shared Excel model knows that transparency is the key to collaboration. Parsing how sheets are linked in a workbook is pure drudgery—imagine how much worse it is to trace a pipeline scattered across individual tools for data prep, ML, and visualization. Without a unified product that facilitate streamlined workflows teams can’t collaborate—or audit and trust project results.
  • Initiatives can’t scale. Analysts can’t be expected to learn how to provision servers or scale cloud microservices. Big data and intense computation requirements are synonymous with AI, so growing no-code tools invariably means standing up servers or scaling cloud microservices—tasks that require IT skills the average analyst doesn’t possess and has no time or desire to learn.

C3 AI Ex Machina eliminates these difficulties by providing everything you need to build, scale, and act on AI workflows in a single, unified, no-code interface.

With Ex Machina, you can connect to all your first-party and third-party data with prebuilt, point-and-click connectors. You can prepare and wrangle data in advance of analysis and share either raw or curated datasets with the other members of your team. In the same interface, you can prep high-performing ML models without writing code or tuning hyperparameters with AutoML.

After that, you can validate and interpret the outcome with explainability features that express results in business language—and publish all the model metrics a data scientist could ask for. And, once trained, you can run models on live data.

You can act on these recommendations by publishing predictions in other applications or BI tools, building dashboards and visualizations within Ex Machina, or integrating with other offerings from C3 AI to configure rich business apps—all without writing a single line of code.

As your project develops, Ex Machina allows you to scale seamlessly as data, projects, and models grow thanks to cloud workspaces that business users can ramp up or down with one click (and without any help from IT).

C3 AI Ex Machina can deliver results today—

  • Get started fast by trying, buying, and learning just one product for all your no-code AI needs.
  • Deliver smarter outcomes by using a product that takes you seamlessly from data to action.
  • Collaborate effectively with your team in simple, transparent, and auditable workflows.
  • Deliver on your AI use cases—without help from IT—by scaling workspaces with one click.

Get started with a free 15-day trial.

About the author

Mark Woollen is the General Manager of C3 AI Ex Machina, leading product, sales, strategy, and marketing for C3 AI’s no-code solution for citizen data scientists. Prior to joining C3 AI, Mark was the SVP of product, platform, and partner marketing at Zendesk. Mark has held senior leadership positions at global organizations including Radius Intelligence, DocuSign, Salesforce.com, Oracle, InQuira, and Siebel Systems.