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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp47TtFbH9o “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 metri