Alteryx Thinks AI’s Future Depends on Analysts Not Engineers

Andy MacMillan wants you to stop thinking about AI as a lab experiment and start thinking about it as a business function. As CEO of Alteryx, MacMillan has spent years building a company that helps analysts wrangle data from across an enterprise. Now, in the era of generative AI and agentic workflows, he says those same analysts, often overlooked and under-resourced, are becoming the most critical actors in the AI economy.

“The real missing piece,” MacMillan said in a recent podcast with author and futurist Bernard Marr, “is those kind of business specialists.” Not prompt engineers. Not AI researchers. People who know how their company actually works, how commissions are calculated, how supply chains are tracked, how product metrics are derived and who can systematize that knowledge into AI-ready workflows. “They’re the ones companies are going to turn to when it’s time to actually implement AI.”

It’s a sharp contrast to the dominant narrative, which often centers on model breakthroughs and foundation AI labs. MacMillan’s view is more grounded, but no less transformative: if enterprise AI is going to move from demo to deployment, it will be business analysts empowered with the right tools who make that happen.

And in Alteryx’s world, those tools already exist.