Announcing AWS App Studio, the Fastest and Easiest Way to Build Applications

Business Wire 10-Jul-2024 12:55 PM

New generative AI-powered service empowers a new set of builders to create applications in minutes

At AWS Summit New York, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ:AMZN), announced AWS App Studio, a generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered service that uses natural language to create enterprise-grade applications. A user simply describes the application they want, what they want it to do, and the data sources they want to integrate with, and in just minutes, App Studio builds an application that could have taken a professional developer days to build from scratch. Modifying App Studio applications is easy using its point-and-click interface, and users also get immediate guidance on how to accomplish a task by asking its generative AI-powered assistant. App Studio opens up application development to technical professionals without software development skills (such as IT project managers, data engineers, and enterprise architects), empowering them to quickly build internal applications that are secure and fully managed by AWS, eliminating the need for operational expertise. This allows users to focus on building applications that help solve business problems and increase productivity in their roles, while removing the heavy lifting of building and running applications. To learn more about AWS App Studio, visit aws.amazon.com/app-studio.

Every company has internal processes and activities that employees manage daily to keep their organization running. Hospital procurement teams track medical supplies to understand what is in stock and to order more when low; account executives at advertising agencies follow a specific workflow when designing, reviewing, and approving advertisements; and property managers monitor their housing inventory and repairs needed on rentals. These processes are time-consuming and often managed through spreadsheets and documents that are difficult to maintain, error prone, insecure, and tough to scale to multiple users. Employees are much more effective when they can use a custom application tailored to these problems, making it easier to enter information, manage complex processes, and connect to their trusted systems, like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) or Salesforce. Despite that, development resources to build custom applications are scarce, and as a result, many internal applications do not get built. That is why employees with technical experience turn to low-code tools to build applications themselves. These tools, however, come with their own challenges. Current low-code tools often have a steep learning curve, requiring platform-specific knowledge, and the applications users build often do not meet their company's security requirements, leading to the information technology (IT) department shutting them down. These applications also struggle to scale as usage grows, forcing users to hand off hosting and running the application to their company's development team. This leaves many employees stuck between low-code solutions that do not meet their needs or continuing to painstakingly manage these processes manually through spreadsheets and documents.

AWS App Studio is the fastest and easiest way for people with some technical experience to build the types of enterprise-grade applications that were previously only built by professional developers. App Studio's generative AI-powered assistant eliminates the learning curve of typical low-code tools, accelerating the application creation process and simplifying common tasks like designing the user interface (UI), building workflows, and testing the application. For example, the user identifies the specific data sources at their company that the application should connect to, using a drop-down menu, and then writes a basic prompt such as, "Create an app for tracking inventory across stores." App Studio generates an outline to verify the user's intent and then builds an application with a multi-page UI, a data model, and business logic. The user can then ask clarifying questions such as, "How can I display the ‘approve' button only to reviewers?" and App Studio gives detailed answers on how to make the change using the point-and-click interface. To test their application, a user simply clicks the "generate data" button to create sample data that will show how their application will handle information in real time. The user can also easily connect their application to internal data sources using built-in connectors for AWS (such as Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon S3) and Salesforce, along with hundreds of third-party services (such as HubSpot, Twilio, and Zendesk) using an application programming interface (API) connector. With App Studio, users do not have to think about the underlying code at all—App Studio handles all the deployment, operations, and maintenance. Once an application is ready to deploy, App Studio generates a custom URL that end users can access using existing enterprise authentication tools and role-based access controls.

"AWS App Studio opens up application development to an entirely new set of builders, helping them create enterprise-grade applications in minutes," said Dilip Kumar, vice president of Applications at AWS. "Designed to meet the needs of the largest enterprise customers and fastest growing startups, App Studio is a force multiplier for technical employees at any company. Now, using natural language, any user with some technical experience can simply describe the application they want to build, and App Studio takes care of the development process, delivering an application that employees can start using immediately. It has never been easier for technical professionals to build custom applications tailored to the unique needs of their business, ushering in a new world of productivity for businesses of all sizes."

Every application deployed via App Studio is highly secure, scalable, and performant, freeing technical professionals to focus on innovating rather than application management. App Studio gives IT teams visibility into every application, so they can easily track usage patterns, control user and data access, and set guardrails to maintain compliance with a company's security policies. It is free to build with App Studio, and customers only pay for the time employees spend using the published applications, saving up to 80% compared to other low-code offerings. App Studio is available in preview today in US West (Oregon).

Campus Life & Style helps over 28,000 students across 50 locations find their room (and community) to call home for the school year. "With App Studio, a team of two were able to build a complete application that streamlines data intake, management, and reporting for our 150-person team," said Scott Puntenney, national revenue manager at Campus Life & Style. "Our market survey process gives us the data to determine the next locations to provide student housing, but this process is excruciatingly manual with more than 150 people involved in data collection, entry, and validation across multiple spreadsheets, forms, and dashboards. We expect that this data processing application will increase the efficiency of our market survey collection and distribution process by 20% and cut down on 98% of the human errors associated with manual data entry. We now plan to roll out App Studio to modernize our financial and HR data pipelines and use other AWS generative AI services to further improve how we manage our processes at scale."

Deloitte is a leading provider of audit and assurance, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory, tax, and related services. "App Studio can help our technical employees build secure, scalable applications in minutes that streamline tasks and increase operational efficiency," said JB McGinnis, US AWS alliance leader at Deloitte Consulting LLP. "As a global provider working with brands from all around the world across various industries, our teams need to operate across a diverse set of clients that all have distinct tasks and processes. With App Studio, our technical employees are able to take charge and easily go from idea to application in just a few sentences, streamlining these activities for the entire team. As teams grow and business goals change, App Studio applications can efficiently scale and shift to our employees' needs, helping us better deliver for our clients."

HealthVerity provides the largest ecosystem of healthcare and consumer data in the US to help build patient journeys and improve patient outcomes. "App Studio opens up low-code tools to our company for the first time, allowing us to leverage our many existing AWS investments and empowering employees to build applications in minutes, instead of days, with the help of its generative AI-powered assistant," said Jeremy Stewart, vice president of engineering at HealthVerity. "Historically, we built all of our internal tools from the ground up because existing low-code solutions did not meet our company's strict security requirement. A small team of five developers had to manage this infrastructure on top of their day-to-day work, increasing our operational costs and taking them away from their core responsibilities. With App Studio, every application is secure and fully managed by AWS, freeing our employees to focus on customer-facing projects."

LaunchDarkly enables high velocity teams to release, monitor, and optimize software in production. "Combining an intuitive UI with a generative AI-powered assistant, App Studio helps bridge the skills gap so the technical employees most familiar with a business problem are empowered to solve it," said Claire Vo, chief product officer at LaunchDarkly. "There are numerous processes that could be managed more efficiently with a custom application, and most businesses are not eager to add a specialized vendor and the associated costs. By lowering the barrier to creating an internal application, the technical employees best positioned to address these challenges can now rapidly solve them with a secure, scalable solution tailored to their problem."

TrustPortal is a no-code, intelligent hyperautomation Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that delivers high-productivity services to contact center agents and customer self-service across all channels. "With generative AI-powered guidance available throughout the development process, App Studio is a game changer for technical employees to create high-quality, visually attractive, and intuitive business applications," said Chris Lamberton, chief executive officer at TrustPortal. "We work with some of today's largest enterprises, so our developers have limited time to dedicate to build and run internal applications. App Studio helps remove the cost and complexity of developing and operating our own internal tools, giving developers more time to innovate on behalf of customers."

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