Alteryx Previews Assisted Modeling Tool for Machine Learning

Alteryx today unveiled an Assisted Modeling tool that promises to make it simpler to create models based on machine learning algorithms using the company’s namesake analytics software.

Announced at the company’s Inspire U.S. 2019 conference, Ashley Kramer, senior vice president of product management at Alteryx, says the beta release of the Assisted Modeling tool represents company’s latest effort to provide end users with access to augmented analytics that reduce the level of expertise require to create advanced analytics.

At the same time, Alteryx announced the 2019 edition of Alteryx Platform now includes an option to employ a familiar spreadsheet interface to interrogate data in addition to tools that foster collaboration and make it easier to centrally collect data.

Kramer says the Assisted Modeling tool is designed to appeal to end users of any analytics level. It guides end users through how to construct machine learning models, understand how and why their models work, and then capture modeling decisions in a way that results in actionable intelligence.

In general, Kramer says Alteryx investments in machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence are all premised on the need to augment decisions that will be made by humans.

“Humans will always be a part of the process,” says Kramer.

The challenge is that the types of end users that now need to interact with an analytics application has never been more diverse. Alteryx sees AI and speech interfaces as an opportunity to make analytics applications more accessible to users that don’t necessarily have a deep background in data science.

Of course, Alteryx is not the only provider of analytics applications heading down that path. In fact, as analytics becomes more pervasively employed the more enterprise software companies come to view analytics more as a feature of another set of applications rather than just a standalone application. There will always be a need for standalone analytics applications. It’s also clear, however, that analytics will increasing be embedded with a wide range of applications, which helps explain why Salesforce is moving to acquire Tableau Software at the same time Google is acquiring Looker.

Kramer says that in many ways Alteryx views both Tableau and Looker as both data sources for its more robust analytics engine. Regardless of what analytics path forward organizations choose the one thing that is apparent is that when it comes to analytics in the enterprise there is clearly no shortage of options.