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Creatio goes agentic but adds an interesting twist

Creatio goes agentic but with a twist; picture by Thomas Wieberneit with a little help of ChatGPT
The news

On June 25, Creatio announced the launch of version 8.3 of its platform, dubbed as the “Twin release”. The release features new prebuilt role-based AI agents, a unified conversational interface, and AI-powered no-code development tools. These new capabilities are natively embedded into the core of the platform.

According to Creatio, the "Twin" release reflects the company's vision of AI as a collaborative force within the enterprise. Katherine Kostereva, CEO at Creatio, stated, “Our approach is human-centric. With this release, we continue to expand our AI-native platform, placing unified, actionable, and composable AI automation at the very core of Creatio. The 8.3 release takes our AI automation to a new level, empowering organizations to transform processes and deliver results like never before.”

Key innovations in this release include

  • Natively Embedded AI and a Unified Conversational Interface: The 8.3 "Twin" Release advances Creatio's AI-native strategy by embedding Creatio’s AI deeper into and across every layer of the platform. Creatio.ai is designed to power real-time automation, provide grounded recommendations, and offer a seamless natural language experience. Users can now interact with Creatio using natural language as the default mode through a refreshed, AI-optimized interface. The assistant utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide responses based on company-specific context. These conversational capabilities are natively available across Creatio's web and mobile applications, as well as within productivity tools such as MS Outlook and MS Teams.

  • Prebuilt, Role-Based AI Agents: The release introduces new prebuilt, role-based AI agents that cover sales, service, marketing and development. These agents are designed to help employees and customers achieve business results faster.

  • AI-Powered No-Code Development: Creatio 8.3 enhances the no-code development lifecycle by embedding AI in the development environment. This allows non-technical business users to build dashboards, pages, and applications using natural language. The platform also enables users to build and customize their own no-code AI agents. The release includes new AI-generated visualizations, smart layouts, and filter suggestions to personalize the development of dashboards and analytics.

  • Unified Platform and Pricing Model: Creatio presents the 8.3 "Twin" release as a single platform with a unified experience. The delivered innovations are part of the core, therefore do not cause integration needs or require additional licenses. Burley Kawasaki, Global VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at Creatio, commented on their approach, stating, “While others are still offering fragmented AI products and complex pricing models, we've taken a different path. This release offers one platform, one experience, and one clear route to accelerated AI adoption and realizing real business value.”

The bigger picture

As I have written before,  no-code and low-code development environments combined with the advance of AI have the potential to dramatically change the world of business software in both, the way they are created and consumed. For the longest time, the make or buy decision favored buying over making for economies of scale reasons. AI-powered no-code environments can drastically change this equation as packaged solutions regularly undergo extensive configuration – i.e., customization via declarative means plus add-on coding – after a solution was purchased. As a result, there is a considerable time and monetary investment after purchase and business applications are quite unique after their implementation. The time to value is quite long. Consequently, baking generative AI directly into a no-code development environment in combination with delivering core applications reduces the need for prepackaged applications while promising faster time to value.

This also affects pricing. As applications are increasingly consisting of agents that are built by agents, the traditional per-user licensing patterns are increasingly under pressure. Where there is an agent there is not necessarily a user. Consumption does not equate to value and additionally does not even have a hard correlation to it.

And customers are interested in value. The judge is still out when it comes to the evolution of pricing models.

The third and ongoing trend is a change to the conversation becoming the new user interface. User – people – do not want to log in to the application frame every time they need to interact with their systems but want to be able to use the system as part of ongoing conversations. This is particularly true for CRM systems.

My point of view and analysis

When it comes to software investments, in particular investments into business software, customers are mainly interested in three things: fast time to value, low TCO, and a high user acceptance. 

Creatio’s “Twin” release addresses all three of these demands while also addressing the changed interaction metaphors. Coming from the workflow side of process software, it is no surprise that the company embeds AI agents deeply into its core and delivers them not only as an integral part of the applications but also of the development environment. This offers immediate automation in the way that users prefer – conversationally, with its direct impact on both, time to value and user acceptance. At this time, the direct support of conversational and productivity tools is limited to mostly Microsoft software, but I expect that this will be extended quite rapidly.

Good TCO comes via offering valuable functionality out of the box, supported by the means to easily adapt it to specific needs. This is at the core of Creatio’s offering, and probably a main reason for providing the development twin, which vastly improves on the easy development concept that Creatio introduced with its Freedom release back in 2022. Add transparent and competitive pricing plus the capability’s being included in the base price into the mix and there is an immediate link to predictable, if not low TCO. When Creatio in a later step (watch this space) will deliver industry specific “Twins”, the TCO and the time to value can get reduced even further. The announcement of a financial services solution will put the company squarely in competition with Pega and to some extent with ServiceNow, which will add some spice to this market, not in the least due to the differences in price points.

One can say that Creatio is on a roll. The infusion of fresh capital in 2024, led by Sapphire Ventures certainly helps in accelerating the company’s trajectory. Thinking business applications from a workflow perspective and adding automation to their creation is in my eyes a strong way to support a move away from rigidly pre-packaged software. 

While I do not believe that the make or buy decision pendulum fully swings to make soon, Creatio is very well positioned to deliver in both worlds. Its platform and base applications deliver good functionality while its AI-powered no-code environment delivers the tools to close functional gaps fast. 


 

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