Introducing SmartClient Answer Engine: The Future of Enterprise Data Exploration
In today’s data-driven business environment, the ability to quickly extract meaningful insights from enterprise data is no longer a luxury but a necessity. Yet for most organizations, the process remains frustratingly complex: data analysis typically requires specialized skills, custom report development, or reliance on pre-built dashboards that may not answer your specific questions.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce our latest innovation: SmartClient Answer Engine (AE), a groundbreaking approach to enterprise data exploration that will transform how you interact with your business data.
Ask Questions, Get Answers. It’s That Simple
Imagine asking your application plain-English questions like “What’s causing the recent sales drop in California?” or “Which sales rep has improved the most over the last year?” and immediately receiving a complete, shareable dashboard with the visualizations and data grids that answer your question.
That’s exactly what SmartClient Answer Engine delivers: no specialized queries, no waiting for IT, no complex setup.
What Makes SmartClient Answer Engine Different
While generative AI is making waves across industries, SmartClient AE stands apart in several critical ways:
1. Zero Training Required
Unlike many AI solutions, AE works with your existing SmartClient DataSources out of the box: no model training, no data preparation, no waiting. It simply connects to your existing application data model and starts delivering insights immediately.
2. Declarative and Inherently Safe
AE generates declarative dashboard definitions and queries, not SQL or JavaScript, eliminating the risk of unexpected behavior. This declarative approach makes outputs easy to audit and safe to share across your organization.
3. Breakthrough Anti-Hallucination System
In a world where AI hallucinations pose significant risks, we’ve developed something truly unique. Our Anti-Hallucination System automatically validates all AI-generated output against known SmartClient properties.
When the AI suggests something invalid, the system provides immediate feedback, allowing the AI to self-correct without any user intervention.
This capability is exclusive to SmartClient and simply impossible with other technologies. Because SmartClient is inherently high-level and declarative, entire dashboards and queries can be expressed in as little as 50 lines of JSON or XML.
Compare this to traditional frameworks like React, where generating equivalent functionality would require thousands of lines of code with hundreds of potential error points that couldn’t feasibly be validated.
4. Enterprise-Ready
AE is built with enterprise requirements in mind:
- Security-First Design: AE respects your existing security model, with access limited to what the current user is authorized to see and do
- Powerful queries: Answer Engine leverages the full power of DataSource features, using advanced search criteria, grouping and summarization, and even aggregated subqueries.
- Browser-Based Processing: Minimizes server load by performing most work in the browser
- Result Caching: Automatically caches previous results for optimal performance
- Built-In Collaboration: Share insights across your organization with built-in sharing capabilities
5. Seamless Integration
Adding AE to any SmartClient application requires just two lines of declarative code. The polished user interface manages answer history, concurrent executions, and result sharing with no additional development effort.
Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
SmartClient DataSources can represent any kind of data: REST services, Parquet shares, document servers, whatever.
DataSources can also represent services that answer questions, such as Morningstar investment risks, Watson document insights, or LexisNexis fraud risks.
Answer Engine can leverage all of the above. To answer a particular question, AE might consult local databases, consult internal documents, pull data shared to you by a partner, check local DBs again and finally summarize the whole process in a dashboard.
Not Just SmartClient: Easy to Embed in any App
It takes just a couple of lines of code to embed Answer Engine in any web application – it doesn’t have to be based on SmartClient.
It’s also very straightforward to create the DataSources that allow Answer Engine to securely access data and to automatically recover from hallucinations. In some cases, we have tools to automate the process (SQL, JPA, etc). For others, we have pre-built connectors. For yet others, we’ve made it as simple and declarative as possible to connect to your custom data or service.
While there are a lot of very good reasons to port existing applications to SmartClient, you don’t need to do so to get Answer Engine – you can have it right now!
The SmartClient Advantage
SmartClient Answer Engine represents a fundamental breakthrough in enterprise data exploration, one that’s only possible because of SmartClient’s uniquely declarative, high-level architecture.
While other platforms might claim similar capabilities, they simply can’t deliver the same level of reliability, security, and ease of use. When generative AI attempts to create complex visualizations and queries in traditional frameworks, the resulting code is too voluminous and error-prone to be practically validated or corrected.
SmartClient is the only technology where AI can feasibly generate complete dashboard responses to data questions and be reliably corrected when it makes mistakes.
Coming Soon
SmartClient Answer Engine is currently in preview at select customers, and you can join the preview program if you contact us. Customers in the Preview Program not only receive early access to Answer Engine, but can also help to shape the Answer Engine via Feature Sponsorship, receiving steeply discounted or even gratis licenses in return.
Want to learn more about how SmartClient Answer Engine could transform data exploration in your organization? Contact our team today.
