AI Tool Lets Small Businesses Make Apps, Just by Telling It What They Need

In its predictions of 2024 workplace trends, website building service Wix suggested that small business leaders should get serious about AI. Given the explosion in AI tech so far, we know that prediction really hit the target, so much so that the company may profit from its own advice. Wix plans this week to launch an AI tool that sounds genuinely useful for any company that needs to quickly build an app: Wix's tool lets you do this normally technical task just by telling the tool what you want. Those awkward meetings where a deeply non-technical executive waves their hands vaguely and demands an app that "just does this sort of thing" suddenly sound a lot less tricky. News site TechCrunch reports on the new tool, which automatically generates an app after a user describes their needs in straightforward language. Once the app is built, users can adjust its design with an editing function--inserting branding imagery, changing the layout, and adding extra features. The final app is said to be "fully native" to either iOS or Android platforms, which means it should run just like any other human-made app optimized for iPhones or Android devices. When everything is ready, you can submit the app to the official app stores, ready for people to actually download. The whole process sounds a lot like Wix's AI-powered website builder, which it revealed in July last year. Speaking to TechCrunch, Wix's co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami said that the idea is to "to offload most, if not all, of the hard work from the user," when it comes to building apps. The simple chatbot-style interface, already familiar to many users of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, means there's a direct line between what a user asks the AI tool to do and final app. "The more detailed the answers to the prompts during setup, the more personalized and complete the AI-generated app will be," Abrahami said. One sticky point, which anyone who's familiar with current-generation AI will spot, is that when you put a query into an AI engine, you can't guarantee the "truthfulness" of what comes out 100 percent, thanks to the actual design of the AI algorithms. In chatbots, this can result in sometimes strange, unsettling or just downright incorrect answers. This problem is also known to affect code that AIs spit out when asked to solve, for example, a thorny programming problem. An incorrect section of code built into an app produced by an AI tool like Wix's could do much more harm than merely telling someone incorrect information, and could make the app fail or possibly even compromise a smartphone's security. But Abrahami was bullish about this problem, noting that Wix's team will improve "the product all the time." Among the clutch of AI tools hitting the market lately, where the artificial intelligence is built into code repositories, Microsoft's business tools, and even Google's search engine, Wix's new tool appears immediately like it would appeal to smaller business users, particularly companies that have minimal--or zero--coding expertise on their team. Apps are also a vital part of daily business for many enterprises, and the ability to very quickly pull together an app that serves as a storefront for your products could be very useful for business planning purposes. But would you want Wix to build a final version of a customer-facing app? And will tech like this put many coders with app-making expertise out of work? That remains to be seen, but as with much current AI-created content, there is still a big role for humans in the loop--the experts who can tinker with what the AI produces, iron out any flaws, make sure that no one else's intellectual property is harmed, and make specific tweaks that maybe only a human coding expert can manage. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON