Low-code has the potential to empower more people to automate tasks by creating computer programs.

Join us on November 9 to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit. On my 12th birthday I got my first computer: an Amiga 500. And at 17, I founded my first company, making software that helped photographers serve their customers. As I reflect on my decades of coding, I'm reminded that low-code technology started with tools enabling users to build custom reports and applications with very little coding. When I started coding, low-code was somewhat analogous to the position artificial intelligence holds today: exciting, much hyped and poorly understood.

Hordes of companies are remaking how they do business to stay relevant in a technology-driven world. But hiring great software engineers who can pull off a digital transformation or artificial intelligence project is hard. Enter a growing legion of "citizen developers," empowered by companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Salesforce and ServiceNow. These ordinary business people create apps using software that technology companies call low-code or no-code software development tools. To use these tools, all you need is a web browser.

Most business process automation is still developed using traditional automation technologies such as workflow engines. These systems provide domain specific languages that require both business knowledge and programming skills to effectively use. As such, business users often lack adequate programming skills to fully leverage these code oriented environments. We propose a paradigm for the construction of business automations using natural language. The approach applies a large language model to translate business rules and automations described in natural language, into a domain specific language interpretable by a business rule engine. We compare the performance of various language model configurations, across various target domains, and explore the use of constrained decoding to ensure syntactically correct generation of output.

Here's one of the many predictions for 2022: Digital transformation driven by the shift to hybrid and remote work will continue to accelerate. COVID-19 served as a wake-up call for companies dragging their feet on digitization. Organizations of all sizes were forced to accelerate their adoption of digital platforms in order to remain operationally efficient. As we transition from pandemic-triggered transformation to the next wave of digitization, some exciting developments are anticipated in two areas of technology that will enable operational agility: no-code platforms and hyperautomation. Typically, hybrid work involves working from the comfort of home and working at the office.

Companies like yours are using AI Builder to automate tasks, increase productivity, and gain insights about their business. At Ignite we unveiled new features for AI Builder, which dramatically increase the ways you can use AI in Power Apps, making it easier than ever to add more kinds of intelligence to your business solutions. Let's walk through these in more detail. Until now, the only way you could use AI in your canvas app was through our five AI Builder controls. This worked, but the controls were limited in the ways you could customize them, and only supported five of our sixteen AI model types.

Will low code apps go any higher? The jury is still out on how high this will all go. Low code and no code might even help business users build AI-driven applications, according to some experts. "Low and no code platforms make it feasible for businesses to deploy artificial intelligence without having to hire an army of pricey developers and data scientists," writes Jonathan Reilly in Harvard Business Review. "Removing friction from adoption will help unleash the power of AI across all industries and allow non-specialists to literally predict the future. In time, no-code AI platforms will be as ubiquitous as word-processing or spreadsheet software is today," Use tools like Amazon AWS to make it easier for you to consume AI services.

Everyone in business today "feels the need for speed". But probably none more so than application developers, who have found themselves dragged out from behind their cubicle walls and thrust into the spotlight of digital transformation. The most successful developers now work closely with the business side using methodologies like Agile and DevOps, which is also in the name of speed to bring products to light sooner. Yet they must do so with the business goals always in focus. Developers are expected to think about the customer experience, create apps in the cloud, enable them for mobile, AI, IoT, edge -- and now to help secure those apps.

At its Build developers conference, Microsoft unveiled its first features in a customer product powered by GPT-3, the powerful natural language model developed by OpenAI, which will help users build apps without needing to know how to write computer code or formulas. GPT-3 will be integrated in Microsoft Power Apps, the low code app development platform that helps everyone from people with little or no coding experience -- so-called "citizen developers" -- to professional developers with deep programming expertise build applications to improve business productivity or processes. This includes apps to review non-profit gift donations, manage travel during COVID-19 or reduce overtime required to maintain wind turbines. For instance, the new AI-powered features will allow an employee building an e-commerce app to describe a programming goal using conversational language like "find products where the name starts with'kids.'" A fine-tuned GPT-3 model then offers choices for transforming the command into a Microsoft Power Fx formula, the open source programming language of the Power Platform, such as "Filter('BC Orders' Left('Product Name',4) "Kids").

"Software is eating the world," Marc Andreessen so famously observed in 2011. Yet now in 2021, it's time to add a new phrase to his famous truism: "and artificial intelligence is eating software." Clearly, artificial intelligence will alter the software business at every level: how applications will function, how they'll evolve, even how they're sold. But likely the most revolutionary of these changes is how applications are created. The AI technology driving this change is called various things, but the phrase "AI-Augmented software engineering" is as good as any.