Over the last couple of years, you've heard a lot about the idea of the autonomous enterprise: a self-optimizing business that applies AI and automation to decisioning, operations, and servicing to deliver effortless experiences for customers and workers alike.
Pega's Center-Out™ architecture is ideally suited to realizing this vision for the autonomous enterprise because it involves:
- A Case management approach that puts business outcomes at the center.
- The ability to manage intelligence centrally for consistent enforcement of Rules.
- Connections to back-end systems through Pega Live Data.
- A consistent, accessible, and responsive experience across Channels.
- A unique ability to scale by managing variation with Pega's Situational Layer Cake™.
Although the term autonomous enterprise is relatively new, it fundamentally represents Pega's vision as summarized by the core Pega theme of Build For Change®. It is according to this vision that we have consistently aligned our development priorities, and Pega Infinity '23 is no exception.
Pega Infinity '23™ introduces Pega GenAI™ to Pega's market-leading low-code platform for AI-powered decisioning and workflow automation. With more than 20 generative AI-powered boosters, Pega Infinity '23 puts the power of artificial intelligence in the hands of every user to improve productivity, increase delivery speed, and make low-code tools available to a range of new users to decrease the cost of delivery through citizen development and fusion teams.
What can you expect from Pega Infinity '23? Let's look at the following release highlights according to our three key priorities: Automation at Scale, Effortless Experiences, and Self-Optimization.
Automation at Scale
Generative AI applies across our entire portfolio of products to accelerate low-code innovation, deliver operational insights, optimize engagement, simplify sales, and create effortless service experiences.
Pega GenAI™️ Workflow Creation
From the developer perspective, Pega Infinity '23 introduces several tools in App Studio to increase productivity for existing Pega developers and make Pega easier to use so that even more people can actively participate in the development process as citizen developers and in fusion teams. The architecture of Pega makes it ideal for generative AI because our low-code Pega Platform™ already automates code creation in support of workflow automation. As a result, introducing generative AI to the development process does NOT involve automating code creation…because code creation is something that Pega Platform already does today.
Instead, Pega GenAI can suggest all of the necessary features of a given workflow and, based on those suggestions — and once those suggestions are accepted — create a functional application like it does today. In Pega Infinity 23, Pega GenAI can suggest Case types, stages and steps, Case fields, data objects, data object pick lists, and personas. As a result, application templates are largely a thing of the past because generative AI can now help produce bespoke starting points that can be adjusted and adapted before building applications. And because humans are always in the loop, application developers don't have to worry about the kind of hallucinations that are so common in other domains.
Pega GenAI™️ Data Mapping and Model Creation
Pega GenAI can also help with data mapping and model creation. It can accurately map data models to external sources, even if those sources are in languages other than the developer's native tongue.
Consistent with our vision for the autonomous enterprise, this data mapping capability is also self-optimizing to increase mapping accuracy over time. In addition to helping with data mapping, Pega GenAI can help create sample data records, localize applications, automate form fills, and generate robotic process automation (RPA) scripts from a prompt.
Reuse Library in App Studio
Many customers have asked us, "How do we make reuse more accessible in App Studio? For everything we build in our COE or a shared layer, we want to make it easily consumable by our app studio users, including our citizen developers." In Pega Infinity '23, Pega answered this question with our new Reuse Library. You can now add, search for, filter, review, and open, reusable assets from multiple categories in the Reuse Library.
Following our Pega Express approach, the new library allows developers to see Case types, data objects, and logic to reuse assets from their application's built-on stack. The new reuse library complements our "modular approach," according to which users build parameterized modules in Dev Studio and assembled and then configure in App Studio.
In addition to exposing custom modules built by your Center of Excellence, you can use the Reuse Library to browse Pega Marketplace and install and add components to an application directly from this page. You can also open them up to see what is inside before adding them to your application.
Effortless Experiences
Pega's Constellation UX architecture is a real game-changer. Aligned with our Center-out philosophy, the Constellation approach ensures that business logic is not built into presentation layers, which means that you can make changes once that reflect everywhere.
For the business, the Constellation design system is well-researched, thoughtfully implemented, and optimized for back-office productivity. Whether using the Constellation design system to get work done or bringing your own design system for customer-facing experiences, Constellation ensures that experiences are optimal and consistently applied.
Constellation also greatly simplifies the building experience for architects, developers, and designers. In contrast to canvas-style approaches to application development that begin with UI — and developers who are not UI experts or experts in accessibility, which can have important compliance implications — Constellation helps developers focus on getting their workflows right, trusting that UI will largely take care of itself.
Because of its alignment with Pega's Center-Out approach, Constellation also has much value for IT managers because it delivers faster performance and easier upgrades.
With over 100 enhancements to Constellation in Pega Infinity '23, the design system has largely achieved outcome parity with our traditional UI architecture. Traditional architecture will have continued support long into the future and, in many situations, will continue to be the right choice. Although organizations do not have to migrate existing applications to Constellation unless absolutely necessary, creating new Case Types in Constellation is a best practice because of its many advantages. For organizations that want to see traditional and Constellation architectures coexist, Pega Infinity '23 also introduces the ability to use Constellation Case types in non-Constellation applications and vice versa.
Accessibility Improvements Aligned to WCAG 2.1 AA Guidelines
Accessibility is vitally important when deploying new software. Not only because failure to comply with regional and international standards can expose an organization to legal and reputational risk but also as a tide that raises all ships. Accessible design is good design, and good design helps everyone.
With Pega Infinity '23, our Constellation design system aligns with WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines to ensure high-quality user experiences out of the box. An enhanced experience for screen readers and keyboard-dependent users includes quick navigation by using keyboard shortcuts (something that has been broadly requested). The release also includes accessibility warnings for situations where a developer decides to apply custom themes and branding.
"Chat With Your Data" Insights Authoring with Pega GenAI™️
The ability to "chat with your data" is another exciting Pega GenAI-powered feature in Pega Infinity '23. By empowering users to explore data using natural language, this feature helps people to overcome data literacy gaps. It helps business users focus on outcomes rather than on having to translate questions and answers in terms of well-designed charts.
When it comes to data exploration, the quality of the output largely depends on the quality of the question. And coming up with the right question is often the hardest part. That's why our new "chat with your data" feature also includes AI-powered suggestions for use as a starting point for analysis.
Manager Dashboards in Process Fabric Hub
Pega Infinity '23 extends the ability of Pega Process Fabric to unify worklists across applications so that managers have full visibility of processes managed by individual workers that affect customers. The ability to monitor work means that managers can more effectively manage outcomes, identify bottlenecks, and ensure consistency. On the other hand, a new Customer 360 dashboard and reporting features provide visibility into the total experience of a customer with your organization.
Self-Optimization
So far, we've covered automation at scale and effortless experiences. What about continuous self-optimization? Pega Process AI uses artificial intelligence in Case management to produce better business outcomes through its use of real-time, adaptive Case predictions (using built-in models and making it easy for organizations to bring their own models).
Pega GenAI™️ Prediction Widget
The prediction widget is a very important feature of Pega Process AI. When introducing AI-powered decisioning to a process, workers must be confident that the decisions are the right ones. The Prediction widget provides workers with AI-powered recommendations while also surfacing the specific features that have influenced a particular decision. This "human in the loop" approach means that workers understand why a prediction was made, which empowers them with the information they need to accept or reject a given production. Without this information, workers may either distrust recommendations or dismiss them in favor of anecdotal evidence. With the right information, however, workers can more effectively assess a given recommendation, and choose to accept or reject it based on real patterns in actual data. Not only does this lead to better decisions, but it also leads to better training of models and greater confidence should a given decision become fully automated.
To make it easier and faster for users to parse the information displayed in the prediction widget, Pega GenAI now provides natural language explanations to complement chart views, which means that users understand more quickly and with greater accuracy.
Case Classification for Intelligent Routing
Pega Infinity '23 also introduced Case classification for intelligent routing to Pega Process AI. The work that occurs frequently depends on how a particular request is classified. For example, work might be classified by urgency to establish priority. Or it may be classified to identify the most appropriate person or department to complete a given piece of work.
When we ask users to classify work themselves, we find that users frequently get assignments wrong (or try to game requests), which leads to assignment errors and the need for reassignment in ways that slow Case handling times to the frustration of workers and customers. Classification frequently requires dedicated resources for triage, assessment, and assignment when handled manually.
With Pega Infinity '23, Pega Process AI can predict the class or category of a Case using natural language processing in ways that are more accurate (and increasingly accurate over time) than self-classification. The process can help prevent Case reassignments, increase Case handling, and make for satisfied customers. It also means that people who triage and route Cases can move from doing the work to supervising the work, which frees them up to deliver more value because they can now take on more and different kinds of work.
Pega Process Mining
Pega Process Mining is available now. Through the ability to visualize complex processes and identify the most impactful optimization opportunities, organizations can continuously improve process efficiency by discovering bottlenecks and identifying opportunities to optimize processes with AI-powered decisioning. In other words, Pega Process Mining helps organizations uncover how their processes work and fix processes that don't.
The nine features discussed here are just the tip of the iceberg. Additional improvements in Pega Infinity '23 that our clients have requested include the ability to author Data Transforms in App Studio. and create and manage Work Queues in App Studio. There are also enhancements to create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) actions through ODATA and REST integrations. With Pega Infinity '23, App Studio is ready for broad adoption. Complemented by an effective reuse strategy (according to which reusable components are built in Dev Studio and exposed via the reuse library for assembly in App Studio), App Studio should be THE place where every Pega project begins (and frequently ends) for professional and citizen developers alike.
In summary, Pega Infinity '23 reinforces that Pega has a clear, compelling vision for the future. While the term "autonomous enterprise" is relatively new, it helpfully summarizes Pega's vision for its products since the beginning 40 years ago: automate at scale, self-optimization, and effortless experiences for all.
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