What are intelligent apps?

Intelligent apps allow both individuals with little or no coding experience, often called citizen developers, and professional developers alike to quickly build software applications. 

With intelligent apps, organizations can leverage business intelligence (BI) and data investments to drive data-informed action within people’s everyday workflows. Tools like Domo give you everything you need to start building an app whenever you want no matter your level of coding knowledge. Intelligent apps typically feature a drag and drop style interface that allows users to customize layouts and apply branding

Low-code vs. no-code.

In the world of intelligent apps, you’ll often hear the terms “low-code” and “no-code” used almost interchangeably, even though they may seem like different things. The phrase “no-code” is mainly used in marketing to appeal to non-professional developers. However, the term is misleading because “no-code” apps are really low-code apps. Even when you drag and drop app elements, there is still code running in the background. Users just don’t see it happening. 

Why are intelligent apps important?

Intelligent apps make the process of business app creation, deployment, and maintenance quicker and easier. They allow organizations to go beyond charts and graphs with customized apps that deliver actionable business insights. Most importantly, they make it possible for individuals to use and create apps without knowing how to code.

For example, Domo worked with the Utah Jazz to create a custom seat-by-seat visualization of their home stadium. The app allows the organization to track key revenue, sales, and attendance metrics — and how different conditions affect those values — for each of the arena’s 19,000+ seats. With this intelligent app, anyone in the organization regardless of their data analytics ability can explore the data, gain insights, and make appropriate changes that will help increase ticket sales. And, because the app was built using Domo infrastructure, it already accounts for storage, security, governance, scaling, and distribution.

Benefits of intelligent apps.

Better time-to-value.
Organizations can use the employees they already have in place to build apps at a faster pace than before without additional training or talent. 

Reusable components. 
Developers can save app design components that are used frequently so that they are easily accessible to drag and drop without understanding the code behind them.

Cut costs with cloud tools.
Intelligent app tools like Domo allow you to build any app in a matter of days without hardware or storage costs.

Break down silos. 
Intelligent apps allow anyone to be involved in the development process, which breaks down silos between IT and other departments in your organization. 

Scale and adapt. 
Intelligent apps make it easy to scale and adapt applications to meet changing needs for your business and your customers. This improves the overall customer experience. 

Report and monitor. 
Intelligent apps can monitor your processes and common workflows to track and analyze their effectiveness. 

Accelerate digital transformation.
Intelligent apps encourage every member of your organization to become comfortable with a new digital tool. Teams can build apps specific to their needs to transform processes from paper to digital. This eliminates the need to wait for IT, removing bottlenecks in the app development process.

Create data-driven workflows. 
An intelligent app enables immediate action. While in the app, users can send data to other systems and trigger actions in those systems to improve their business.

How do intelligent apps work?

Intelligent apps present users with a visual environment for developing applications. Instead of lines of code, users see components that can be dragged and dropped into place, all operating in a user-friendly interface that helps them visualize the final product as they build. Intelligent apps use drag and drop modelers, pre-built connectors, and other smart services to power the process. 

What should I look for in an intelligent app tool?

The tool you choose to use to create intelligent apps makes all the difference. While it is important for those without extensive coding experience to be able to create apps, it is equally important that your intelligent app tool provides developers with app development tools for them to do more advanced creation.

Tools like Domo provide developers with the entire foundation they need to build apps faster. With all of your data in one place and built-in data governance and security, all of the elements that developers would normally need to put in place before they begin building are already taken care of. All that’s left to do is start creating your business app. 

How do businesses use intelligent apps?

There are infinite ways that a business could use intelligent apps for greater business intelligence and improved experiences. Here are a few examples: 

• Sales Scorecard App. Track your sales rep performance in real time, and help them visually see areas where they can improve. 
• Sales Commission Transparency App. Help your sales team understand how their commissions are paid so they can set more effective goals and have more informed personal planning. 
• Campaigns App. Create more effective campaigns by tracking efforts against performance goals. 
• Retail Store Performance App. Allow retailers to monitor every aspect of store operations from sales to inventory to man hours. 
• Franchise Performance App. Get up-to-date information on the status of each of your franchise locations. 
• Form Builder App. Streamline and improve the way your organization creates forms and questionnaires internally and externally.
• Inline Editing App. Allow users to update datasets without coding knowledge by simply editing lines of data. 
• Billing Review App. Help your team review customer invoices in one central location and make adjustments directly in the app. 
• Talent Management App. HR departments can track potential employees through the application, interview, and hiring process.

How will intelligent apps evolve in the future?

With intelligent apps powered by tools like Domo, anyone and everyone in an organization will be able to create rich, data-driven experiences and make better business decisions. Intelligent apps won’t replace professional developers. Instead, they will drive developers toward higher productivity as they can deliver apps more quickly and easily. 

In the next several years, the majority of enterprises will adopt the use of intelligent apps into their everyday operations.