Generative AI and no-code development tools are revolutionizing the software landscape. As a new generation of business software is built leveraging AI, no-code tools are essential for putting these powerful capabilities within reach of a much broader audience than traditional professional developers. This combination offers businesses the best of both worlds: the ability to rapidly create highly customized experiences and workflows with the ease of off-the-shelf solutions.
How does a modern AI-native, no-code app development platform unlock this new era of business software? Let’s start with an overview. This article will then explore Creatio, an AI-native, no-code platform that empowers business users to build their own apps and automate CRM and workflows.
Tapping AI and No-Code for App Development
A no-code development platform furnishes users of any technical skill level with a variety of composable software elements and intuitive tools to assemble applications. No single no-code platform will include every ready-to-use building block for every business or specialization. However, these platforms can often get you 80% of the way there, with the flexibility to easily define and configure the unique pieces that are specific to your business. Furthermore, by using the no-code approach, business users leverage their intimate knowledge of business operations to create apps and process automations that are closely aligned with their unique needs and usability requirements.
Through the power of AI, a no-code platform can extend user empowerment to all stages of the application life cycle, from initial design and development to deployment, customization, governance, and continuous optimization. For example, based on user requirements provided in natural language, AI can instantly suggest appropriate app templates, create prototypes using existing UI components, and connect them with corresponding data models and workflows. It can also efficiently optimize existing processes to improve key performance indicators (KPIs). Moreover, an AI-native, no-code platform can provide agentic AI capabilities within your apps and workflows.
By using natural language and no-code tools, users can set up AI agents as part of their applications to autonomously execute end-to-end workflows, conduct customer interactions, and generate personalized content. Therefore, the power of an AI-native no-code platform lies in the synergy of continuous advancements in unified AI capabilities and ever-expanding libraries of no-code components and tools. Together, AI and no-code promise to allow users to create richer, more dynamic apps and address a wider range of emerging AI-powered business use cases.
Creatio: AI-Native, No-Code Development
Let’s now examine the app development process with Creatio, an AI-native platform that is designed to automate CRM and workflows with its no-code functionality. Creatio is based on a no-code, composable architecture, meaning that its components and features are all customizable and extendable via a graphical user interface (GUI), configurations, or natural language input. Additionally, Creatio offers seamless, unified AI capabilities across predictive, generative, and agentic AI use cases.
App development in Creatio begins with a library of prebuilt components and templates based on the intended purpose of your new app. Users can choose from existing presets and composable apps, or can describe their vision for a new app using natural language, allowing Creatio’s AI to assemble a starting prototype.
After using AI to kickstart app development, the next step involves fleshing out your prototype with all required UI elements, data models, and workflow automation. This is simplified via a combination of no-code and AI.
Freedom UI Designer
Creatio’s Freedom UI Designer is a visual drag-and-drop UI editor enables you to create and set up modern, fully responsive applications, including mobile apps. You can effortlessly design user interfaces from prebuilt layout templates, like pages with tabs and dashboards, and select from hundreds of components, dashboards, and widgets to design unique experiences that align with your business goals. The Freedom UI Designer unifies UI and business logic development under a single, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) approach. This enables users to set up business rules and data structures based on UI elements, natural language input, and automated suggestions from previously used data objects.
Process Designer
Creatio also offers a 100% no-code user experience for business workflow automation. With Creatio’s Process Designer, users can model structured business processes and seamlessly integrate them within their apps. There is also a Case Management Designer for non-structured processes that are commonly used to set up all stages of the user journey within the application.
As you can use AI for rapid UI prototyping, you can also leverage Creatio’s native AI capabilities for workflow design. Creatio can create workflows from text descriptions and suggest valuable workflow components as you progress through the design process.
AI Command Center
In addition to offering AI throughout the app development process, Creatio lets users incorporate AI capabilities—including predictive, generative, and agentic AI patterns—inside their custom applications. To do this, Creatio provides the AI Command Center. This tool organizes existing AI Skills—which are AI-powered app use cases—and enables users to create completely new ones. New AI skills, just like other parts of your Creatio-powered apps, are created through natural language input and a no-code UI. These AI skills then become part of your Creatio AI assistant, which you can access within any part of your application.
For instance, when working with customer data, you can rely on the Data Enrichment AI Skill of your Creatio AI assistant to populate customer data from both internal and external data sources. You may also take advantage of the Next Best Offer AI Skill and ask Creatio AI to generate a list of personalized product recommendations for the customer, built based on user engagement history and other pertinent data. Finally, you can use agentic AI skills, such as loyalty management, to prompt Creatio AI to set up and run a personalized loyalty program for that customer.
You can also create AI skills unique to your business or the workflows that support them. You are not limited in the AI use cases that can be achieved and put in place. These AI skills drive action through no-code workflows to extend the impactful reach AI’s capabilities have on systems and data sources. The more data, workflows, and assets you have unified within your AI-native platform, the more autonomously orchestration you can set up with AI.
Creatio No-Code Playbook and Toolkit
Even with easy-to-use tools, it can be intimidating for non-developers to get started. They often do not know how to successfully organize the processes or roles across their organization in order to make their projects a success. To address this, Creatio has introduced a software development methodology adapted for the no-code era, called the No-Code Playbook. It includes all of the typical processes, project phases, team roles, and collaboration tools that have been tested on numerous real-world customer projects.
As AI and no-code technologies continue to make great advances in the enterprise, platforms like Creatio offer power and promise, enabling users to build the applications they require, exactly when they need them. They can do this without relying on IT resources or waiting for IT resources to become available. It represents a promise of faster innovation cycles where the proof is in the living product rather than documentation and code. It is a place where AI automation puts adaptive and personalized experiences at the forefront of all enterprise software.
