Alteryx Looks To Become An AI Data Powerhouse With New Unified Platform

With today’s launch of the new ‘Alteryx One’ platform, Alteryx – which has undergone a significant leadership change since late 2024 – looks to expand beyond its data analytics roots and provide a comprehensive system for preparing data and managing data flows for a range of AI applications.

Alteryx debuted a new unified platform Wednesday that combines the company’s AI-powered analytics and data preparation capabilities with a centralized management portal and unified licensing that the company said gives customers greater flexibility to automate and scale analytics across their data ecosystems.

Alteryx, which is holding its Inspire 2025 event in Las Vegas this week, is also touting the new Alteryx One platform as the centerpiece of the company’s vision of positioning its technology as an “AI Data Clearinghouse” that provides transformed, governed data for AI applications and agents.

“If you really take a step back and look at Alteryx, we're a data workflow platform,” CEO Andy MacMillan (pictured) said in an interview with CRN. “I think the way in which companies operate their infrastructure is going to change dramatically because of AI in the next, you know, three to five years.”

“And I think people are going to one want direct access to their business data underneath their business applications. I’m not going to go through all those APIs. I just want to get to my data and I'm going to want to be able to build new workflows around that data,” he said.

Alteryx, headquartered in Irvine, Calif., is using Inspire 2025 and the Alteryx One launch as an opportunity to position its software as both an industry-leading data analytics platform and a system for transforming and managing data for AI tasks.

This week’s announcements follow significant changes in the management at Alteryx. MacMillan was hired in December, filling a post that had been vacant since January. Other recent hires include Nali Giliana as chief strategy officer, Jon Pexton as chief financial officer, Steven Birdsall as chief revenue officer and Ben Canning as chief product officer.

The management changes followed the acquisition in March 2024 of then-publicly traded Alteryx by Clearlake Capital Group and Insight Partners for $4.4 billion.

The Alteryx One Vision

MacMillan said the Alteryx One platform is key to the company’s strategic direction, along with working more closely with the major cloud hyperscalers and developing Alteryx’s data transformation and governance technology for building AI data workflows.

The CEO said that while Alteryx has developed a lot of innovative analytics and data management software, the technology “wasn’t easily accessible” due to the way the company’s products were packaged and licensed.

Alteryx One provides a centrally managed platform, with new tiered packaging and a unified licensing portal, that unifies all those capabilities including analytics automation, low-code/no-code data preparation and blending, AI assistance, cloud flexibility and enterprise governance.

“Alteryx One is really about unifying the whole Alteryx platform so that [customers] can take advantage of all that Alteryx has to offer under a single, unified experience [and] a single license,” said Ben Canning, chief product officer, also in an interview with CRN.

The platform includes the AI Control Center, a centralized portal for managing the entire Alteryx portfolio regardless of deployment model and ensuring consistent access and usage policies. AI Control Center provides unified orchestration functionality, combining license management with built-in security, governance and visibility into AI interactions, including with large language models (LLMs).

Alteryx One also offers real-time data access through the new Live Query for Databricks and Snowflake tools and introduces shared connectors for establishing reusable connections to cloud data sources. It also provides new and updated connectors for Azure Synapse, Qlik and Starburst platforms.

“I sat with leaders at one of the big hyperscalers a couple of weeks ago and they were lamenting that there is about 80 percent of the knowledge workers out there that their data platform just can't touch,” Canning said. It's too complicated. There's too much code that needs to be written. It's too targeted at data science. They don't have tools that analysts and business users can really use to get value out of these systems. And they believe – and we believe – that Alteryx is the key to unlocking all of that power.”

An AI Data Clearinghouse

In addition to serving as the Alteryx flagship analytics product, positioning Alteryx One as an AI Data Clearinghouse for centralizing and orchestrating high-quality, trusted data for AI applications, is a key component of the company’s vision and strategy for the future of AI and analytics.

“The need for clean, usable, trusted data has never been greater,” Canning said.

Central to the AI Data Clearinghouse approach is the workflow governance capabilities within Alteryx One, overseeing such data processes as anonymizing personally identifiable data, ensuring regulatory compliance, and removing proprietary intellectual property – critical steps for preparing data for AI systems.

The AI Data Clearinghouse concept allows organizations to access and connect structured and unstructured data across a wide range of sources; cleanse, enrich and transform data; apply data governance and security controls; bring LLMs and agentic AI capabilities to data-powered workflows; and deliver auditable, approved workflows for AI use.

Alteryx also announced the general availability of Magic Reports, which uses AI to automatically generate tailored reports within Alteryx One Auto Insights. Alteryx Copilot, an interactive AI assistant to help with workflows and deliver insights, is now available for public preview. And GenAI Tools, which introduces generative AI into workflows to automate complex tasks, generate insights and orchestrate logic, is now in private preview.

CEO MacMillan said partners will benefit in multiple ways from the new Alteryx offerings. Alteryx One, for example, provides partners with a more complete system that incorporates all of the company’s innovations – as well as future developments.

“That's important, if you're a partner, because it makes it easy for you to go in and provide more value to customers,” he said.

Many partners already have deep relations with the cloud hyperscalers, so they will benefit from Alteryx’s closer ties with those companies, according to the CEO.

And the focus on AI data and data processes synchs with what MacMillan described as the “number one need right now” among businesses and organizations developing and implementing AI systems.