Appian World 2025 took place from April 27 to April 30, 2025, at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center in Denver, Colorado.

During this event, Mike Beckley, Appian’s chief technology officer and co-founder, unveiled the company’s long-term strategy for intelligent automation. He emphasised that process, rather than hype, should drive the promise of AI, ensuring that humans remain firmly in control.

Beckley explains how the key lies not just in adopting new tools, but in rethinking how leadership, design, and technology intersect to empower both employees and customers.

It’s a bold mission, especially in a world where tech hype often overshadows practical value. But for Appian, the unglamorous work of building reliable, intelligent processes is exactly what has earned it trust across some of the world’s most demanding industries, including financial services.

“Appian is today, and has been for over 20 years, a process company,” begins Beckley.

From the global banking sector to insurance and fintech, institutions are under pressure to transform with AI while maintaining rock-solid compliance, security, and auditability. And according to Beckley, it’s not the flashiest tools that win, it’s those that deliver results without compromising control.

“We didn’t know what state-of-the-art technology would be in 2025, and we didn’t care,” Beckley recalls of Appian’s founding in 1999. “What we cared about was, could we as an organisation be a reliable partner to our clients who were going to face this challenge of how do they constantly transform themselves to take advantage of new opportunities and avoid risk with technology?”

That ethos, technology that empowers rather than overwhelms, feels increasingly relevant amid a gold rush of AI adoption. For Appian, the focus is not on building the biggest language models or the most eye-catching generative AI tools. It’s on embedding intelligence into mission-critical workflows.

“Companies like Palantir and Appian have recognised that the value is in the process you use to operationalise the AI,” says Beckley. “It’s in the data platform, the data fabric that allows you to bring the AI securely the right data.”

Why financial services need smart process, not just smart AI

The financial services sector has long embraced automation, but as Appian CTO Beckley argues, the real risk isn’t the lack of technology, it’s poor process design. He cites the 2008 mortgage crisis not as a failure of innovation, but of oversight and judgment.

“That’s automation run amok,” Beckley says. “You could click on your phone and get a mortgage and get a house without any thought, like, was that really a good idea? That’s where you have a failure of process.”

This is where Appian’s value proposition comes into sharp focus: it offers not just AI, but intelligent process automation (IPA) that is governed, traceable, and aligned with business goals.

Whether it’s managing Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, orchestrating international payments, or navigating mergers and acquisitions, the stakes are too high for unreliable automation.

“We aren’t replacing the human so much as we are empowering a human to do 10 times or 100 times as much work more accurately,” Beckley explains. “And do that because we use AI to do things like read documents that process of getting a child the care they need, getting the insurance coverage, getting them the caregiver assigned, making that process happen 83% faster.”

Agents that don’t go rogue

While generative AI has taken centre stage in tech media, Appian’s approach to AI agents is more grounded and more business ready. These are not novelty bots. They are built to execute complex, long-running processes in highly regulated environments.

“If it matters that the agent makes a mistake, then the strongest guardrails and the strongest assurances are going to come from a company that can demonstrate on day one that the agent operates on processes whose goals are explicitly controlled and managed,” says Beckley. “Every action by the agent is monitored and auditable.”

For CIOs in financial services, maintaining control over data isn’t optional, it’s essential. Appian’s AI framework, which includes integrations with platforms like AWS Bedrock, is designed to support data privacy and compliance requirements by keeping sensitive information within established boundaries.

“So, we’re not interested in reinventing the wheel,” Beckley adds. “But those other tools turned out to be quite primitive, and it was easier and faster for us to build our own reasoning, planning and memory, because we had so much of it already.”

That deep library of validated, industry-specific processes allows Appian to deploy AI agents that actually work, and that clients can trust.

Scaling value, not just features

There’s another compelling reason Appian’s message resonates in finance: ROI. With mounting regulatory scrutiny and margin pressures, banks and insurers aren’t just looking for “cool” AI. They need measurable business outcomes.

“The same Appian application I sold you for a million dollars last year and it gave you $7m in value, AI agents can give you $70m in value in the near future,” says Beckley. “And therefore, I should be able to charge more for it.”

Underpinning this scaling promise is Appian’s investment in process orchestration and its proprietary data fabric, a system that connects disparate data sources across the enterprise while maintaining security and governance.

“That investigative process of finding the right data to get to the right answer and resolving an issue, we see vast potential for agents to address much more complex activities,” he adds. “And the more we can provide orchestration for those agents to supervise each other and validate each other and learn from each other, that’s the frontier.”

Playing the long game in AI

Despite the industry’s obsession with being “first,” Beckley sees strength in restraint.

“We waited, we’ve taken our time,” he says. “And we’ve used Appian’s private AI framework, our secure technology built on our cutting-edge process platform and our data fabric to safely bring AI to the most sensitive and important missions.”

Those missions increasingly include the back-end plumbing of financial systems, the workflows that aren’t visible but are vital: mortgage approvals, risk assessments, regulatory filings, and fraud investigations.

“The most headline-grabbing AI stories might come from chatbots or viral demos,” Beckley admits, “but the most impactful stories, the ones changing how businesses actually run are happening behind the scenes with process automation.”

And that’s where Appian thrives. In the parts of the enterprise where accuracy matters, where compliance is non-negotiable, and where AI must do more than impress, it must deliver, reliably and at scale.

“We’re not chasing hype,” he concludes. “We’re building the infrastructure that helps financial institutions trust AI, not just try it.”

In a space where trust is currency and failure are costly, Appian’s message is simple: process isn’t boring. It’s powerful.

Sign up for our daily news round-up!

Give your business an edge with our leading industry insights.