Henry Khalife
CEO, GW Apps
The Rise of No-Code Platforms
The emergence of No-Code and Low-Code platforms in recent years has significantly transformed the landscape of application development and business process optimization. These tools have truly democratized the creation of business apps, enabling business and non-technical users to rapidly design, develop, and deploy applications. By accelerating the development process, these platforms have helped many businesses launch scalable apps at a fraction of the cost and time required by traditional coding methods.
Market studies confirm the rapid growth and adoption of No-Code and Low-Code platforms. According to Forrester, the combined Low-Code and Digital Process Automation market reached $13.2 billion by the end of 2023, growing at an average rate of 21% since 2019. This market is expected to exceed $50 billion by 2028.
GW Apps has been working in this space for a number of years, and have helped clients build thousands of applications with our No-Code platform. We’ve seen many wins, but we’ve also seen businesses keep delaying their digital initiatives. We thought we would share our experience and vision.
Why are many businesses still behind on their digital journey?
Although a large number of companies are getting great results with these tools, not everyone is on board yet. The transition from idea to application still remains a challenge for many, and smaller businesses are often slower to adopt this technology. An OECD report on SME digitalization confirms that many SMEs continue to lag in adoption, with smaller SMEs experiencing growing digital adoption gaps compared to larger firms.
There are two main reasons/challenges leading to this digital adoption gap:
- Learning curve: While these platforms are designed to be user-friendly, the learning curve can still be a barrier. We have been impressed by how quickly our power users are able to ramp up and build valuable business applications, but not everybody manages to make such rapid progress. Learning how to create complex, robust, and integrated applications requires time and effort that many organizations don’t have availability for or are unable to commit to without adequate support, training, and resources.
- Lack of in-house expertise: We’ve talked to many IT leaders who were interested in moving to a paperless platform but didn’t have anyone with the skills and experience necessary to effectively evaluate various vendor offerings, manage the shift from old systems, ensure staff training, and integrate new technologies with existing processes.
Could GenAI be the solution to overcome these adoption challenges?
The combination of No-Code and AI offers a promising solution. Here are just a few of the ways AI will help ease adoption and utilization of No-Code tools:
- Simplify Development: With Generative AI, users will be able to articulate their application needs in plain language and have the platform create a starting application with the desired features, and then guide them through further customization.
- Boost Learning and Ease Adoption: Platform-trained, chat-based AI assistants will significantly speed up the learning process and make adoption of these platforms easier by providing instant support without the need to sift through extensive documentation or wait for human support.
GW Apps & AI
In response to these challenges, GW Apps has begun integrating AI-powered features into its platform. Supported by Google’s Cloud team and leveraging Gemini AI, GW Apps is working on new features designed to fulfill its commitment to making app development easy for less experienced users. These features include:
- App Building Assistance: Guide users in creating forms, fields, workflows, and other design elements through natural language input. This tool significantly simplifies the app creation process, making app building more efficient and less intimidating for beginners.
- Platform Assistant: A platform-trained, chat-based AI expert that can understand and process user inquiries in natural language, providing responses that are not only immediate but also contextually relevant and highly informative.
- Email & PDF Generation: Utilize AI to assist users with leveraging advanced features such as generating custom email templates and PDF content, streamlining the documentation and communication aspects of app development.
- Enhance Decision-Making: Users can leverage AI to evaluate and report on data trends and extract general sentiments and key phrases, enabling them to make more effective data-driven decisions. This is particularly useful for apps that collect soft data, such as market, opportunity or client analysis, and user surveys.
Future Direction
The combination of AI with No-Code platforms marks a watershed moment in application development. This combination addresses key challenges, democratizing application development and increasing digital adoption in smaller companies by simplifying development and providing instant, AI-powered support. As No-Code and AI continue to evolve, their integration will allow even more users to create powerful apps, and for all users to deliver real business insights and empower meaningful data-driven decisions. The future of app development lies in harnessing these technologies to empower users across all levels of technical proficiency to achieve more and deliver greater value.
About GW Apps
These are some common use cases our clients have successfully automated using the GW Apps No-Code platform:
- Business Applications: Purchase approval, authorization requests, asset management, event planning, employee performance reviews, custom CRMs to follow up on customers requests, and the like.
- Paperless Platforms: Replacing paper forms with digital ones improves data collection, security and storage, and helps streamline business processes.
- Legacy App Migration: No-Code platforms greatly reduce the cost and time of migrating and modernizing old apps and processes.
- Employee Self Service Portals: Enables employees to directly request and track common services from a central online site.
