Is Andy MacMillan the Only Tech CEO Not Buying the Agentic AI Hype?

While enterprise software giants rush to deploy autonomous AI agents, Alteryx is taking a more grounded approach. CEO Andy MacMillan has made it clear: the company is not interested in racing to replace humans with AI. Instead, it is focused on building trust, transparency, and control into the foundations of enterprise analytics.

“We are being sold on the idea of running before we can walk or crawl,” MacMillan told Tech Monitor. His caution stands in contrast to the dominant trend in enterprise tech, where companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, and Snowflake are rolling out AI agents capable of reasoning and decision-making without human oversight.

Alteryx’s strategy centers on a new platform called Alteryx One. Rather than pitching full autonomy, the company is offering structured workflows, governed data access, and analyst-friendly tools that integrate AI in support roles, not as replacements. It is an intentional move rooted in real-world implementation challenges, and in MacMillan’s own experience with generative AI.

He joined Alteryx in December 2024, shortly after the company was acquired for $4.4 billion by Clearlake Capital and Insight Partners. Having previously served as CEO of UserTesting and held senior roles at Salesforce and Oracle, MacMillan had seen both the promise and the limits of large language models in enterprise use. “It was good at using creative content to make more creative content,” he said. “But it wasn’t good at using data to identify which service teams were suffering a productivity challenge.”