Today, Builder.ai launches a beta of Natasha, the world’s first AI-powered product manager in its continued efforts to democratise software development with Builder Studio 3.0. The new platform introduces the beta of Natasha, the world’s first software product manager, powered by AI. For the first time, she (the AI) can interact with customers, starting to remove massive amounts of human variance in the journey from an idea in their head to the app in their hand. The idea-to-spec journey is the hardest part of a human only process, causes the most human variability, and ultimately affects consistency and the predictability of a project, causing those notorious stretching timelines and costs with no end in sight.
Natasha has the ability and potential to switch software development from being a long-drawn-out consultancy operation to a smooth, predictable, consistent and replicable process. So, every product built has the same quality and the same immaculate processes behind it. In the beta, she will show up in two areas of the Builder Studio: through a chat experience for customers and also as an agent listening to customer conversations, automatically tagging features and asking questions of the customer-facing teams (via chat), thereby ensuring that every conversation is powered by the collective insight of all conversations.
“Builder.ai’s mission has always been to be the connection between every great idea and a fully realised product, whilst giving our customers the utmost control over their future,” said Builder.ai Co-Founder and CEO, Sachin Dev Duggal. “We’ve launched the new Builder Studio 3.0 with the beta of Natasha to push the envelope of what we all thought was possible. Imagine a world where you can pick up the phone, speak to Natasha and three days later have your app in the AppStore; this is the future we are building towards.”
Natasha can manage projects in real time with unparalleled transparency and consistency, compressing weeks of work into hours and minutes. She possesses the rationality to translate an idea into a set of features; break a project into parallel streams for a faster build; choose the best developers; set timelines; and calculate budgets. All of this was only possible manually before. At a conventional development shop, just that first stage – turning an idea into a spec doc – takes anywhere between 2-6 weeks. This involves sitting through dozens of meetings for weeks until the product begins to take shape. But with Natasha, it can all happen in an hour.
Builder.ai was recently recognised in the Gartner 2021 Magic Quadrant for Multiexperience Development Platforms (MXDP) as a Visionary. Gartner says: “Visionaries demonstrate a strong understanding for the MXDP market and have the technical and go-to-market wherewithal to excel.” One of only three new entrants in this Magic Quadrant, we believe Gartner has added Builder.ai for its innovative product offerings, market understanding and strategic growth plans. Gartner evaluates companies on their completeness of vision and ability to execute, and Builder.ai’s AI-powered platform was placed furthest right for completeness of vision within its quadrant. Builder.ai enables businesses with no tech knowledge (or the time to do it themselves) to order custom software.
Traditional platforms (low-code/no-code/SaaS) are aimed at experts and require extensive training and expertise. These haven’t removed expertise from the equation and still need to be complemented by professional services that use the respective platforms.
We feel this Gartner Magic Quadrant recognition of Builder.ai’s differentiated zero-code platform as a new way to create software further enforces the company’s belief that customers want software “built for them” rather than building it themselves, which removes the customers’ necessity to find experts entirely. It combines Lego-like reusable features that programmatically snap together AI (machine learning, computer vision, knowledge graphs) to vastly reduce human effort, and then intelligently selects from a network of experts who work on the platform to finish off the last mile. Unlike other platforms, customers get a complete copy of their code, which gives them total control over their tech, without having to become an expert; this also allows Built by Builder.ai applications to be seen in the AppStore and Google Play (most low-code/no-code apps are only internally consumed).
“Since April 2020, we’ve seen 12x growth in monthly net revenue for the Builder Studio product, and 6x+ increase in new customers over the last 12 months. As a virtual Product Manager, Natasha will help enrich these customer experiences and increase productivity,” added Sachin Dev Duggal. “The development of any intelligent agent such as Natasha is a process of continual learning and refinement. She’ll continue to evolve and learn over time as she’s fed more data and has more experience engaging with customers.”
Natasha is powered by much of the AI the company has built over the last two years from multiple machine learning (ML) applications that include natural language processing (NLP), feature and template recommendations, as well as statistical models for pricing and timeline estimations. All of these are powered by Builder.ai’s patent pending Knowledge Graph. But what makes Natasha special is her potential to be suggestive. She learns and adapts with every new conversation to get better at the one thing she loves – building software.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Multiexperience Development Platforms, Arun Batchu, Adrian Leow, Jim Scheibmeir, Van Baker, 26 July 2021.
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