The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Half of business technologists now produce capabilities for users beyond their own department or enterprise. That's the top finding in a new report from Gartner, which cites "a dramatic growth" in digitalization opportunities and lower barriers to entry, including low-code tools and AI-assisted development, as the core factors enabling this democratization beyond IT professionals. What's more, Gartner reports that 77% of business technologists -- defined as employees who report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics capabilities -- routinely use a combination of automation, integration, application development, or data science and AI tools in their daily work. "This trend has been unfolding for many years, but we're now seeing a tipping point in which technology management has become a business competency," Raf Gelders, research vice president at Gartner, told VentureBeat.

If you've been keeping up with us, you know that our core goal is to deliver extreme agility with no limits, allowing everyone to innovate. And if you're new here, now you know what OutSystems is all about. A future with no limits is one where intelligent tools augment the work of users with the expertise learned from millions of anonymized code patterns. At outsystems.ai, we're building that future with the ultimate goal of making app development 100x faster, while enabling pro developers and business people to deliver robust, high-quality applications with different levels of complexity. That's why we're happy to announce the general availability of our next-generation AI-Assisted Development capability, which is built right into Service Studio -- the OutSystems development environment.

Abstracting away low-level infrastructure by one-click deployment and automatically provisioning the entire stack to run an application. Abstraction and automation are only possible if we come up with common patterns and turn these patterns into a single concept. Developers will lose some flexibility, but gain a lot of speed and don't have to know about the underlying details. My job with the Mendix R&D team is to find the right patterns to include in our platform and to balance speed, ease-of-use, flexibility, and control. The result should be that we continuously improve the productivity of a broad spectrum of developers. It is easy to say that everyone needs to contribute to software because it is the core of the business, but how do we get all these people started and productive? That's where Machine Learning comes into play in the form of AI-assisted development. It is the logical next step for low-code platforms as it adds the next level of abstraction and automation.