BUSINESS PROFILE
didn’ t really do a lot. It was just this presence on the Internet. The real value was when the marketing team was able to use it to actually share information with customers, or the merchandising team was actually able to sell stuff online in a way that was convenient for customers. We’ re still in that transition right now.
Do you think there is an AI bubble?
Yes, but I think in the way bubbles often happen in technology, which is at a broad base, there will be a bunch of overvaluation that happens around this. But as always in technology bubbles, there are specific examples of where that valuation was completely justified. Technology goes through this sector interest, and everybody piles money and resources and interest into it, which forms a bit of a bubble. But out of that, there are usually these massive winners that are very successful. There will both be amazingly valuable new companies and industries and things that come out of this AI wave that will be the antithesis to‘ it was a bubble’. There will be a ton of investments that don’ t turn into that, or companies that don’ t make it over the wall, or things that people got wrong about AI. And there will be real losers in that.
It’ s often said that AI will not take people’ s jobs away but allow humans to do more meaningful work instead. What are your thoughts on this?
It’ s similar to the answer on the bubble, which is, it’ s a yes and no. In aggregate, AI will change the constraints on how a business operates. We’ ll be able to do things we weren’ t able to do before. This happened with the Industrial Revolution. We changed a lot of the big constraints around how we built things and the manual labour required. We ended up building lots more stuff. The Industrial Revolution created tons of jobs, but it changed the constraints where the jobs were, how companies were organised, and that causes a lot of displacement in the process.
You could say for an individual person, it’ s quite likely AI will impact what they do, how they do it, maybe what company they work for, how their company is organised, how many people are in the kind of role that they’ re in at that company. Absolutely, AI will impact that. Do I think it causes long-term mass unemployment because we don’ t need people to run companies? I don’ t believe that at all.
We find a way to always build more companies and more things and more productivity in our society.
I think anybody who feels like AI won’ t be disruptive isn’ t maybe taking the lens of the individuals that are in the economy versus the economy overall.
And how does your company help other companies with regards to AI use?
We help companies build a lot of automation into what they do. Alteryx is used a lot by supply chain teams, operations teams, finance, accounting, tax; folks like that. I always think of the people in your company that, in reality, sort of run the business on Excel.
We help a lot of people in the business who today solve problems using data, and again, are the spreadsheet crowd, to build the interfaces that work with AI, and they still own those interfaces. The first step of using AI is you have to have predictability and automation in your systems. It goes to your very first question about trust. If I ask the AI to help me forecast my demand planning process, and it has to know how many parts are in the tool shed, I have to believe that it knows how many parts are in the tool shed. If it just guesses, then this isn’ t very helpful demand planning. We help people put that infrastructure in place that empowers the business. And then we’ re helping people connect their data and their knowledge into these AI systems in a way that the business can drive.
And finally, what’ s next for your company?
For us, we’ re really focused on helping people automate a lot more of their internal systems and get their data AI ready. And then we’ re starting to see people look at ways to agentically build. If you today look at things like Claude code, which is a big trend in AI, where it can write software, the challenge for a lot of people in the business is that’ s a really valuable skillset for AI to have. But I don’ t speak software development. Our business users don’ t want to read Java or Python at the end of this process, but they do want to be able to create things. We’ re working with the these big AI vendors to enable AI to instead build them an Alteryx workflow. So instead of ending up with code, they end up with this canvas that explains a workflow of things to interoperate with. x
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