Microsoft, Salesforce generative AI investments drive innovation in low-code platforms

The digital transformation era has brought forth the need for accelerated app development and intelligent automation, prompting innovative enterprises to investigate how they can utilize emerging technologies in their businesses. Under this backdrop, Microsoft and Salesforce have been named leaders in the low-code space for their integration of generative AI, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company. 

GlobalData’s “Low-Code Platforms: Competitive Landscape Assessment” report reveals that the low-code market segment has become fiercely competitive. Microsoft has strengthened its competitive position by coupling its Power Automate offering with the new Azure OpenAI service, while Salesforce has continued to consolidate the Salesforce Flow/Automation and Einstein tools, including Einstein GPT CRM tools within its new Data Cloud platform.

Charlotte Dunlap, Research Director at GlobalData, comments: “Global public cloud platform providers such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are rapidly pushing into the low-code market as they launch strategies around visualization tools, automation capabilities, and, importantly, new generative AI strategies and technologies.Furthermore, emerging technologies such as generative AI will play an important role among DevOps teams, with capabilities already being integrated into some low-code, automation, and security platforms.”

Low-code vendors have been disrupting the application platform marketspace with a model-driven visual approach, significantly speeding the app development process, including collaboration between business and IT stakeholders.

Dunlap continues: “This is achieved through high-productivity design tools, AI-injected connectors to backend systems, increased use of ML models, and intelligent automation technologies—all of which address complex workflows. AI has been incorporated into numerous solutions in the low-code market, building on next best action models to react more quickly to event-driven architectures.”

Emerging generative AI technologies will help eliminate baseline coding and scripting, while helping to automate operational provisioning among DevOps team members.

Dunlap concludes: “Consolidating these innovations into low-code platforms and solutions helps abstract complex configurations required to react to business events, further automating business processes and enhancing the customer experience. It's not surprising that emerging technologies, including process automation, application security, and observability—whose daunting complexities threaten adoption—are also being coupled with low-code platforms.”