The news

On June 25, Creatio announced the launch of version 8.3 of its platform, dubbed as the “Twin release”. The release features new prebuilt role-based AI agents, a unified conversational interface, and AI-powered no-code development tools. These new capabilities are natively embedded into the core of the platform.

According to Creatio, the "Twin" release reflects the company's vision of AI as a collaborative force within the enterprise. Katherine Kostereva, CEO at Creatio, stated, “Our approach is human-centric. With this release, we continue to expand our AI-native platform, placing unified, actionable, and composable AI automation at the very core of Creatio. The 8.3 release takes our AI automation to a new level, empowering organizations to transform processes and deliver results like never before.”

Key innovations in this release include

• Natively Embedded AI and a Unified Conversational Interface: The 8.3 "Twin" Release advances Creatio's AI-native strategy by embedding Creatio’s AI deeper into and across every layer of the platform. Creatio.ai is designed to power real-time automation, provide grounded recommendations, and offer a seamless natural language experience. Users can now interact with Creatio using natural language as the default mode through a refreshed, AI-optimized interface. The assistant utilizes retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide responses based on company-specific context. These conversational capabilities are natively available across Creatio's web and mobile applications, as well as within productivity tools such as MS Outlook and MS Teams.
• Prebuilt, Role-Based AI Agents: The release introduces new prebuilt, role-based AI agents that cover sales, service, marketing and development. These agents are designed to help employees and customers achieve business results faster.
• AI-Powered No-Code Development: Creatio 8.3 enhances the no-code development lifecycle by embedding AI in the development environment. This allows non-technical business users to build dashboards, pages, and applications using natural language. The platform also enables users to build and customize their own no-code AI agents. The release includes new AI-generated visualizations, smart layouts, and filter suggestions to personalize the development of dashboards and analytics.
• Unified Platform and Pricing Model: Creatio presents the 8.3 "Twin" release as a single platform with a unified experience. The delivered innovations are part of the core, therefore do not cause integration needs or require additional licenses. Burley Kawasaki, Global VP of Product Marketing and Strategy at Creatio, commented on their approach, stating, “While others are still offering fragmented AI products and complex pricing models, we've taken a different path. This release offers one platform, one experience, and one clear route to accelerated AI adoption and realizing real business value.”

The bigger picture

As I have written before,  no-code and low-code development environments combined with the advance of AI have the potential to dramatically change the world of business software in both, the way they are created and consumed. For the longest time, the make or buy decision favored buying over making for economies of scale reasons. AI-powered no-code environments can drastically change this equation as packaged solutions regularly undergo extensive configuration – i.e., customization via declarative means plus add-on coding – after a solution was purchased. As a result, there is a considerable time and monetary investment after purchase and business applications are quite unique after their implementation. The time to value is quite long. Consequently, baking generative AI directly into a no-code development environment in combination with delivering core applications reduces the need for prepackaged applications while promising faster time to value.

This also affects pricing. As applications are increasingly consisting of agents that are built by agents, the traditional per-user licensing patterns are increasingly under pressure. Where there is an agent there is not necessarily a user. Consumption does not equate to value and additionally does not even have a hard correlation to it.

And customers are interested in value. The judge is still out when it comes to the evolution of pricing models.

The third and ongoing trend is a change to the conversation becoming the new user interface. User – people – do not want to log in to the application frame every time they need to interact with their systems but want to be able to use the system as part of ongoing conversations. This is particularly true for CRM systems.

My point of view and analysis

When it comes to software investments, in particular investments into business software, customers are mainly interested in three things: fast time to value, low TCO, and a high user acceptance.

Creatio’s “Twin” release addresses all three of these demands while also addressing the changed interaction metaphors. Coming from the workflow side of process software, it is no surprise that the company embeds AI agents deeply into its core and delivers them not only as an integral part of the applications but also of the development environment. This offers immediate automation in the way that users prefer – conversationally, with its direct impact on both, time to value and user acceptance. At this time, the direct support of conversational and productivity tools is limited to mostly Microsoft software, but I expect that this will be extended quite rapidly.

Good TCO comes via offering valuable functionality out of the box, supported by the means to easily adapt it to specific needs. This is at the core of Creatio’s offering, and probably a main reason for providing the development twin, which vastly improves on the easy development concept that Creatio introduced with its Freedom release back in 2022. Add transparent and competitive pricing plus the capability’s being included in the base price into the mix and there is an immediate link to predictable, if not low TCO. When Creatio in a later step (watch this space) will deliver industry specific “Twins”, the TCO and the time to value can get reduced even further. The announcement of a financial services solution will put the company squarely in competition with Pega and to some extent with ServiceNow, which will add some spice to this market, not in the least due to the differences in price points.

One can say that Creatio is on a roll. The infusion of fresh capital in 2024, led by Sapphire Ventures certainly helps in accelerating the company’s trajectory. Thinking business applications from a workflow perspective and adding automation to their creation is in my eyes a strong way to support a move away from rigidly pre-packaged software.

While I do not believe that the make or buy decision pendulum fully swings to make soon, Creatio is very well positioned to deliver in both worlds. Its platform and base applications deliver good functionality while its AI-powered no-code environment delivers the tools to close functional gaps fast.

The news

I had the pleasure of spending two days at the Creatio NoCode Days in the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, together with customers, partners and some fellow analysts to learn about what is new and to generally learn more about Creatio itself.

The event itself showed a very vibrant community of customers and partners.

On topic, in a nutshell, the event was all about whether and how AI reshapes business software, its creation, deployment, use and the corresponding impact on a business’s ecosystem.

Creatio reiterated its four pillars of having AI at the core, AI being actionable, creating unified data through AI and offering a composable architecture, demonstrating this with four core agents, the marketing, sales, service, and studio twins, and how they help users become more efficient. Based on these pillars, Creatio enables customers to have fast turnaround times when implementing necessary changes. This drives a high user adoption and satisfaction plus a low total cost of ownership.

It also changes the role of the CIO and, equally crucial, of implementation partners. CIOs morph more into partners and advisors for the business units while implementation partners focus less on the actual implementation but on identifying the value of an implementation, therefore turning more into consultants.

There have been a multitude of customers and partners – on and off stage – who shared their experiences. Extreme ones include the functional replacement of a failed CRM implementation in a mere weekend and a seven thousand seat implementation with a 100 per cent user adoption that the company attributes to the flexibility of the system and the users’ ability to (within limits) adapt the system to their needs.

The bigger picture

The increasing popularity of no-code and low-code development environments combined with the advance of AI has the potential to dramatically change the world of business software. For several decades now the make or buy decision is in favor of buy because buying a prepackaged software is strongly supported by economies of scale.

Of course, the downside of this is that software regularly needs to be configured (i.e., adapted using tools that require no coding) or customized (including tools that require coding) to fully support business needs. Depending on functional gaps, this causes considerable implementation time and cost after buying or subscribing to the software. Configuring or customizing tasks regularly need to be performed by specialized people, external consultants or dedicated in-house personnel. This often causes slower than desired progress. None of this did really change in times of SaaS. Consequently, the time to value for customers is often still quite long. A positive side effect for vendors is that this tends to create a buyer lock-in while systems integrators can make tidy time and material revenues.

In come no-code and low-code development environments and business applications that are built and delivered on top of these platforms. This has two effects. First, it becomes fast to develop new business applications as limited or no technical knowledge at all are required. This leads to removing above mentioned bottleneck by broadening the pool of people that are able to build or adapt applications for business needs – the so-called citizen developer has been born. The impact of a no-code platform is even bigger if it gets delivered as a part of a business application, i.e., if the application itself is already built on it.

Lastly, generative AI services can boost this effect a lot. Vibe coding is in everybody’s mind and some business leaders already predict a 100x productivity increase. Whether these predictions are spot-on or optimistic, a significant productivity increase will not only be seen in developing new applications but also in their adaptation to customer needs – the configuration and customizing process.

My analysis and point of view

Whoever I talked to during the event spoke about three things.

• Fast time to value
• Low TCO
• High user acceptance rate

So, Creatio is certainly up to something. One thing that contributes to this on the user side is the strong emphasis on making the interaction with the system follow human communication patterns, i.e., conversational, while being available where the user is instead of forcing users to work within the application frame. The other part is terminology. While every vendor, including Creatio positions its AI agents as helpers that take away onerous tasks, employees often see them as a threat rather than as helpers. Creatio addresses this by going a smart step further. The company names its agents “Twins”. This is a term that has far more positive connotations. A twin is not a threat but instead one’s best friend.

The second point is that we actually might be at a tipping point that flips the business applications playbook. For years vendors have made the point that it is far more efficient to deliver prebuilt software that works around “best practices” and is adapted to industry and customer needs when needed. Especially with cloud software, customizing capabilities were drastically reduced, compared to on premise solutions. One thought behind this is the avoidance of changes where a company is unlikely to have a differentiator. A mostly unacknowledged one is that maintenance is far easier for the vendors if customizability is limited.

As a result, the implementation of business applications became cumbersome, lengthy, and expensive. The combination of powerful no-code environments and generative AI has the potential to flip this calculation. If this flip happens, Creatio and a few select other vendors are uniquely positioned to take advantage of it. Evidence for this are a focus on the midmarket and the lower end of the enterprise market, an ecosystem that already now has understood that systems integrators need to offer high value services and turn into consultants and customers praising fast implementations and low TCO. Another indicator is the genuine care that Creatio exhibits for its customers. CEO Katherine Kosterova says that she wants to continuously “delight customers, no matter what”, but what Creatio really is doing is having its customers backs. This is effectively even better as it does not create the same vicious circle that the objective of “continuously delighting” customers does.

What remains is getting more attention. With events like the NoCode Days, working with analysts and showing successes, Creatio is on a good way here, too. The challenge remains to continue to send signal in an ocean of noise.

And maybe the signal that the age of packages software is past its zenith is just that signal.