By Thierry Bonfante, Chief Product Officer, Unqork

The race to the AI-powered enterprise is on, but most organizations are still trying to figure out where to start. Now, the Unqork Enterprise App Cloud provides a powerful, scalable, and future-proof way forward.

Besides accelerating development of AI-enabled apps, Unqork addresses critical underlying challenges like security and compliance, so businesses can innovate without taking on the burden of maintenance and tech debt.

I. Introduction

Ready or not, AI-enabled applications are coming, and their impact is going to be enormous. Goldman Sachs analysts predict that AI tools alone could add $7 trillion in net-new economic value annually. With so much to gain, the vast majority of C-suite leaders—85%, according to Accenture—want to increase their AI investments.  

Under competing pressures to both innovate and reduce costs, business and tech leaders cannot afford a wait-and-see approach, especially since the gap in performance between digital leaders and laggards is already huge. The CAGR of digital leaders averages 6X that of laggards, according to McKinsey, and AI is only widening that gap. “Over the past three years, the spread in digital and AI maturity between leaders and laggards has increased by 60%,” McKinsey analysts wrote in early 2024. 

Yet, so far, only 9% of companies have adopted AI technology in a significant way, MIT researchers have found. Because the technology is both so powerful and so new, the list of concerns of business and tech leaders is long and keeps growing. AI technologies, along with their potential use cases and regulatory requirements, are evolving so quickly that leaders are understandably hesitant to make major investments, despite the potential of outsized returns.

Over the past three years, the spread in digital and AI maturity between leaders and laggards has increased by 60%.

McKinsey Digital, 2024

II. The challenges to adopting AI-enabled applications

First of all, let’s address one misconception that can still stall discussions about implementing AI. Not that long ago, AI initiatives required large teams of vanishingly scarce data analysts and data scientists. They had to build bespoke AI models and do the hard and complex work of managing enormous datasets, data warehouses, underlying hardware, etc. And they still needed highly skilled developers to write code in order to integrate the AI models into enterprise applications–code that then had to be continuously managed, upgraded, and secured.

This is no longer the case. Now, businesses can leverage prebuilt AI models designed to solve for very specific use cases. They can even work with trusted partners like Google’s Vertex AI or Amazon’s Bedrock, which allow customers to deploy and easily manage a variety of AI models through a managed service on their own infrastructure. However, leaders still face a number of challenges when it comes to integrating those AI models within applications, including:  

• “Where do I even start?”: While leaders have little doubt about AI’s importance, they’re still trying to separate the hype from reality. They are unsure how they can tackle AI in a practical way and actually move the needle for their organization. Meanwhile, both the number of AI technologies and related regulations are evolving so fast that many leaders are hesitant about implementing AI. They want to avoid unnecessarily high risk ranging from compliance issues and poor ROI to project failure due to unforeseen complexities. 
• Talent gaps and stifling tech debt: Nearly 70% of IT leaders report that tech debt is holding back innovation. Because organizations are spending so much just to “keep the lights on,” it’s no surprise that there is a talent gap, especially an AI talent gap. These talent and tech debt bottlenecks leave little room to tackle AI and innovate.
• Security risks. While AI outputs may be distinct from other kinds of enterprise data, they can still contain sensitive information—especially when businesses train AI tools on their proprietary data. Not surprisingly, CSO recently reported that 71% of organizations were concerned about data privacy and security when it comes to AI. 
• Compliance and data lineage risks: While regulations around AI are still in flux, there is little no doubt that they will grow more, not less, stringent. And AI has raised all kinds of concerns, including “privacy, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, third-party relationships, legal obligations and intellectual property,” PWC analysts warn. Whether firms choose proprietary LLM , third-party solutions, or a hybrid model, data lineage and “traceability”—the ability to track AI outputs, how they are used by internal systems, and who sees their output—is a critical concern.

III. How Unqork’s unique approach helps enterprises leap-frog AI challenges

With deep and wide experience in some of the world’s most highly regulated industries, the Unqork Enterprise App Cloud lets you create, secure, and manage enterprise applications in the cloud and unleash the power of AI. Unqork is uniquely able to solve the core challenges that are holding enterprises back from leveraging the game-changing power of AI within their applications.

1. Flexible, open, and future-proof innovation

Historically, low-code/no-code and other SaaS providers have created “moats” that lock in customer IP and data. Unqork’s approach is completely different. With an open architecture built on standardized web technologies, you never have to rip-and-replace your existing ecosystem. You can easily integrate with third-party solutions, legacy tools, AI solutions, and virtually any emerging technology–all with zero code. 

In fact, Unqork has gone one step further by becoming the first full-stack enterprise development platform to make its platform spec available as open source. That means customers and partners can create innovative components designed to interact with Unqork’s platform. 

Finally, Unqork’s unique architecture means we can handle all application upgrades and maintenance on an ongoing basis, because your apps are pure configurations. We take care of the underlying code and infrastructure. In other words, you finally get to focus on innovation and gain a truly scalable, future-proof path to the AI-powered enterprise. 

2. Rapid, intuitive development of AI-enabled applications that’s 3X faster 

The Unqork Enterprise App Cloud enables you to build complex, mission-critical apps 3X faster, all with a 100% drag-and-drop visual designer. Unqork also provides business accelerators targeted at specific use cases. And Unqork makes it easy to connect to third-party applications, databases, on-premise systems, and cloud data into Unqork–and quickly can scale those integrations across the company. 

In addition to these capabilities, Unqork’s GenAI Connector streamlines the process of integrating and configuring a connection to a third-party GenAI tool within an application. With the GenAI connector, organizations can: 

• Establish connections to the GenAI tool of their choice, choosing the vendor that best suits their policies and use cases. 
• Customize the template for their specific use case, and test to ensure the integration is working as expected. 

By accelerating development and taking on the burden of managing applications across their lifecycle, Unqork minimizes risk and democratizes the adoption of AI, while providing a scalable path to unleashing it across the organization.

3. Robust, enterprise-grade security you don’t have to worry about

Ideally, all of an organization’s data resides within a single-tenant environment, and it never leaves its own ecosystem. However, AI depends on data for its power, including proprietary data for many use cases. 

To secure both proprietary data and the output of AI that draws on that data, businesses can partner with vendors that keep both data and AI solutions in a single-tenancy cloud environment. Or they can go one step further and leverage an open sourced LLM that enables firms to copy the model and run it entirely on their own proprietary systems. 

However, businesses still need to secure outputs of any AI integration as they move to other systems and are served up to customers. The Unqork Enterprise App Cloud provides a powerful way to securely leverage AI across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC), all from one central location. As a result, enterprises can: 

• Own their own data and encryption. 
• Rely on a single tenant architecture with certifications for FedRamp, SOC 2 Type II, ISO, HIPAA, and more. 
• Quickly and efficiently apply role-based access controls (RBAC) at both the module and component level. 

4. Compliance and data lineage of application outputs

Imagine that a regulator asks you to show the exact output from an AI integration at a specific point in time or that you need to review an interaction a customer had with your AI chatbot. Without native data lineage capabilities in place, organizations could face a long and costly process involving third-party consultants. 

The Unqork Enterprise App Cloud enables peace of mind with native support for data lineage of AI outputs. With Unqork, you can go back to any point in time and see what data outputs were generated or modified by the integrated AI tool and what user or customer interacted with the data in that moment.  

IV. So where should enterprises start leveraging AI within their organizations? 

In 2023, less than 5% of enterprises used GenAI-enabled applications in production environments. That number is expected to skyrocket to more than 80% by 2026, according to Gartner. And Unqork is in a unique position to help enterprises unleash AI in the context of very tangible, impactful use cases across their organizations.

Instead of endless debate about AI’s possibilities, Unqork customers can quickly deploy AI solutions with a clear, measurable, and easily achievable objective, rather than tackling AI for its own sake. And for the vast majority of businesses, it’s not the most powerful or creative AI use case that will win the race, but solutions that are straightforward and user-friendly. Examples include: 

• Personalize customer journeys. From natural online conversations and enhanced sentiment tracking to pixel perfect-experiences, you can leverage AI to delight customers with highly personalized, differentiated journeys. 
• Boost employee productivity. You can use AI to contextualize data and analyze abstract information to make smarter decisions more quickly. 
• Accelerate the digitization of complex workflows. Tap into all your data to orchestrate complex workflows and digitize manual processes—without writing a single line of code.

Instead of endless debate about AI’s possibilities, Unqork customers can quickly deploy AI solutions with a clear, measurable, and easily achievable objective.

McKinsey Digital, 2024

Here are some of the ways that Unqork clients are powering their use cases with AI: 

Google’s Gemini + Unqork: AI-powered client-facing advisor interactions

It has traditionally taken financial advisors significant time and effort to prepare for client meetings. They need to gather details about clients, their accounts, and performance of those accounts from across multiple CRM systems and market feeds.

By leveraging Gemini together with Unqork, wealth management firms can automatically provide advisors with intelligent client and portfolio summaries, meeting background, and cross-sell opportunities. As a result, a process that requires hours of the financial advisor’s time and effort is complete in a matter of minutes. 

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) + Unqork: Intelligent data extraction and document processing

Many enterprises still rely heavily on manual document capture and data extraction to drive their most sensitive processes. You can change the game by combining IDPs with AI-powered intelligent data extraction and document processing with the Unqork Enterprise App Cloud. Together, they enable highly regulated organizations torapidly build and effectively power complex data workflows and seamless experiences for their customers and employees. Use cases include: 

• Loan operations. Rapidly automate the extraction of key data points from complex credit agreements, post-process to meet formatting requirements, stage for review, enrich with key reference data, feed into the golden source, and release to downstream systems.
• Investment guideline compliance. Automatically cull guidance requirements for specific clients from signed documents, and implement restrictions to account activity. 
• End-to-end underwriting. Empower underwriters to focus on their highest-value activities, and win more business by rapidly and accurately ingesting submissions data, automating triaging, and accelerating submission response times.

V. Unqork: A faster, more future-proof path to AI-enabled enterprise applications

From accelerating time to value to providing a sustainable approach to security and compliance, Unqork is uniquely positioned to support the AI-enabled enterprise in a time of rapid technological and regulatory change. 

To learn more about what your organization can achieve, reach out here.

Unqork’s Quarterly Platform Release gives enterprise organizations access to a range of powerful new capabilities for building smarter, more impactful applications, including an accelerated path to integrate third-party or proprietary AI tools and rapidly deploy AI-enabled applications. 

With these advancements, Unqork is empowering enterprises across the financial services, insurance, and public sectors to create smarter, more dynamic applications than ever before.

What’s in this release

• GenAI Connector: Build AI-enabled applications with ease by seamlessly integrating third-party or proprietary AI tools, enabling rapid application deployment. 
• Application Versioning: Streamline collaboration and simplify application maintenance by creating and managing multiple versions of the same application simultaneously, minimizing disruption and boosting productivity.
• Data-Centric Development: Ensure peak application performance and data integrity by seamlessly integrating data models within your module using a simple drag-and-drop interface with Data Models & Schemas. Additionally, simplify API endpoint configurations and easily return data in the desired format without complex workflows with the new Visual Query Builder.
• Vega Tables: Take back control of your data with Vega Tables, a centralized table component that unifies your data into a single, easy-to-manage location.
• Operations Builder: Simplify complex UI interactions with minimal manual configuration. Build complex logic against a given set of events and operations, enabling the creation of dynamic and responsive user interfaces.

GenAI Connector

Unqork’s GenAI Connector simplifies and accelerates the creation of secure, enterprise-ready AI-enabled applications–and eliminates the need for code and the tech debt that comes with it.  With GenAI Connector, Unqork takes on the burden of maintaining applications throughout the entire lifecycle—empowering you to focus on innovation.

Benefits:

• Simplify the integration of GenAI solutions into your applications through an intuitive connector that accelerates modernization efforts.   
• Rapidly and iteratively create AI-enabled applications with Unqork’s 100% drag-and-drop visual designer.
• Create AI-enabled applications equipped with enterprise-grade security and compliance.
  

See GenAI Connector in action

Published Application Versioning

To release business-critical features given today’s complexity of large, interconnected applications, enterprises must implement robust processes like CI/CD, comprehensive testing, and manual QA to coordinate parallel work across teams and minimize errors. Published Application Versioning helps solve this challenge by allowing enterprises to run more than one version of an application at a time and eliminating the need to update every connection in an application with each new version. Now, you can create and test multiple versions of the same application in parallel, without any disruptions.

Benefits

• Easily promote and test without disrupting development, increasing speed to market.
• Enable multiple teams to collaborate simultaneously on the same application, boosting productivity and innovation.
• Leverage enhanced application security measures, including disclosed application patch numbers and semantic versioning
  

See Published Application Versioning in action

Data-Centric Development

With new Data-Centric Development features in the latest release, Creators no longer have to structure and validate data manually or rely on workarounds that can compromise application quality. With Data Models & Schemas, users can seamlessly integrate data structures throughout workflows, speeding time to market, increasing application quality, enhancing security, and lowering technical debt. Then, Visual Query Builder allows users to easily access their data by quickly configuring API endpoints and returning data in the desired format without complex workflows.

Benefits:

• Rapidly build schema-compliant user interfaces, and simplify data extraction to achieve faster time to value.
• Seamlessly integrate data structures for enhanced data quality and application performance.
• Lower tech debt by improving development efficiency, enhancing data governance, and reducing errors.
  

See Data-Centric Development in action

Vega Tables

Vega Tables eliminates the need to sort, search, and manipulate data across multiple tables by consolidating all functionalities into a single Table component. In addition to providing a cohesive and comprehensive solution for data management needs, Vega Tables offers responsive, native-feeling interfaces similar to spreadsheet environments.

Benefits:

• Save time and energy by quickly gathering and organizing data into a singular tabular display, and seamlessly navigate and edit data.
• Effortlessly edit and input data by providing users with a seamless, familiar spreadsheet-like experience for data entry and management.
• Build insight-driven applications by enabling advanced filtering, sorting, and search query capabilities.
  

See Vega Tables in action

Operations Builder

Instead of manually hard-coding values, Operations Builder provides Creators with a modern UI allowing them to easily build and customize operations and events for Vega Tables, including filtering, adding rows, removing rows, navigating to different table pages, and more–all with zero code. As a result, users no longer have to run operations manually in the Table component and can instead use scalable logic components to control and trigger them.

Benefits:

• Simplify the configuration process by providing a guided, easy-to-read experience for Creators, expediting time to value. 
• Deliver a seamless and intuitive interface that eliminates the need for manual entry to create tailored Table logic.
• Provide end-user flexibility and customization by unlocking the ability to review, organize, and search data in their Tables more efficiently and tailored to the business needs.

See Operations Builder in action