Building Trust in AI-Driven Analytics

Hey everyone. Welcome to Techstrong TV's coverage of Alteryx Inspire 2026 Conference here in the beautiful JW Marriott in Orlando. We're going to be here interviewing some of the Alteryx executive team, partners, customers, really giving you a flavor of what's going on.

It's interesting times to say the least, and I'm sure it's going to come through loud and clear in our interviews today that Alteryx is a company embracing the moment, leveraging the technologies and solutions available. I couldn't think of a better person to actually kick it off with than Michelle Huff, the CMO at Alteryx. Hi, Michelle.

Nice to have you on here. Yeah, thanks for having me. So I mentioned you're the CMO.

You're here about nine months now, though. Yeah. But give people a sense of your story arc, your journey to becoming CMO here.

Yeah. So I am a technology product-minded gal at heart. So I started back in the early days.

Do you remember the dot com boom? And- I was there. Those were the days.

I know, right? So literally, I remember being with this technology that would take Word documents and make them available on web pages. " And so that was the pushback.

So we've come a long way. That was 50 million trees ago. I know, right?

So, I've seen a lot in this tech journey. I started off in small startups, and then ended up going to Oracle, and then was at Salesforce. And then ended up becoming CMO for Apption, for user testing, and then here- Really?

At Alteryx, yeah. Oh, that's cool. Yeah.

Yeah. My tech journey started right before the dot com days. Yeah.

When I wound up actually founding and selling a company in the dot com. The company I sold to, and I stayed with and helped, we did the whole IPO, dot com IPO thing and all that. We were an ASP- Oh, yeah ...

hosting Lotus Notes. No cloud, T-1 internet lines. Oh, yeah.

And we're serving up Lotus Notes on Domino servers and don't ask. Those were the days. Those were the days.

I look back on it, it was painful then, but I look back on it now as what a golden time. Oh, I know, right? I think right now we're going to look- It's crazy ...

even though it's a little crazy now, we're going to look back on this, too. 1,000%. So you came to Alteryx about nine months ago.

Yeah. You're our first interview of the day. It's going to fall on you to, for our audience maybe who's not familiar with Alteryx- Yeah ...

give us a little Alteryx primer. Yeah. And you've done a lot of great things.

I'm sure you had lots of opportunities. What got you excited about Alteryx? Yeah.

So, been in tech for a long time and really started off, as I mentioned, in websites and infrastructure. And then went to more of the CRM and then spent a lot of time in data. And then I went into application land for a while.

And then very last was around user experience. How do you make applications that customers love? And so I think what really drew me to Alteryx is, if you don't know us, we've been around for more than 25 years.

And in the world of data, people are constantly dealing with spreadsheets and lots of different data in all these different places. And so Alteryx has always been a solution that helps solve all these messy, complex data challenges. And how do you bring data sources together, and then how do you actually automate the steps that get from data to insight?

And so we were powering things behind dashboards and reports. And really today, it's how do we start powering things in this more modern, AI-driven, when people don't want the dashboard, they want to actually be able to chat and get their answers. So how do you get that from your ChatGPTs and from your Gemini and large language models and even these next generation agentic applications- Yes ...

and powering. Not just stopping at the dashboard, but those different applications as well. So I found it to be a really compelling technology we have.

So we're here at Inspire- Mm-hmm ... a huge customer conference, and it's this amazing, passionate customer base. We have over 750,000 people in our community.

Wow. Yeah. That's fantastic.

I didn't realize it was that big. Right? And then over 8,000 customers, and so as a marketer, I'm always drawn to products- Number of customers.

Okay ... that people love and in a market space that's really compelling and interesting and wanted to come back to my data roots and to a solution that's really thinking about how do we innovate for this next future, but with a solid customer base that you want to- I get it. I love it.

Look, I think one of the issues, like a lesson I learned. " Because people want to move off the spreadsheets onto something. And really, Alteryx, 25 years, is making a living on, hey, we're better than just a spreadsheet.

I know. The spreadsheets are still here. Yeah, people are still using them.

Do you see them? Well, I ran in this morning. Yeah, and sure enough, everything's on a spreadsheet.

I said, "No, I'm taking it out of this. " Oh, nice. But I wanted to talk, you mentioned AI.

Yeah. Look, it's sucking the oxygen out of every conversation we have in tech today. Let's do this.

Let's start at the general about how AI is affecting Alteryx's business in general. Yeah. And then let's focus in on what it means for marketing for you.

Yeah. So how it's affecting Alteryx in the market, in many ways, it's a huge part of everyone's conversations, and you see everyone experimenting and trying new things. And I think what people are running into is, and you've experienced, everyone's experienced, you're having this conversation, and with your, I call mine a ChatGPT, I call Chatty.

So Chatty and I are having a conversation. Well, you have to. And so- I know.

I've had this conversation on the way up. Do you give it a name? Do you stop calling it a name?

But go ahead. Yeah, so me and Chatty. " And if you have the expertise, you know how to go in, and you know how to be able to validate.

Mm-hmm. And so I think that the challenge is, people are trying to move from just personal productivity to things of how do I automate more? If I'm thinking of this world of agents and having tasks, part of how we do work gets done.

How do I autonomous... If you're going to let these agents make decisions on their own and start doing things. Scary.

" Mm-hmm. Is it actually making decisions that I would actually be able to understand what it's doing and why? Can I inspect it?

If I'm held accountable, do I trust it? And so, I think from an Alteryx standpoint, what we've been really honing in is there's certain types of tasks that are great for generative. Every time you ask, it's something new because it's great.

Mm-hmm. And then there's other ones, like trying to calculate the revenue within your organization. There's a lot of departments where you don't roughly want to know the answer.

You need to- Exactly ... specifically know the answer, and you need to be able to show how you got to it if you got audited. And there's a lot of these kinds of calculations.

There's a lot of these types of data sets, of insights, that need that logic- Mm-hmm ... to actually be visible and needs to be understandable, repeatable. It all needs to be transparent, too.

Transparent, exactly. And so I think it kind of opens up an interesting opportunity, we believe, from an Alteryx standpoint- Mm-hmm ... to be able to do that.

And so, there's a little of how the whole market is changing, how we're seeing data, how we're seeing business context. Who owns what? It's an interesting debate because it's all kind of shifting and changing, and people are realizing things.

And so, a big part of it is where do we fit? Where does it make the most sense? And that's what we've been kind of focused on at a company level.

We see it as well. I think you hit on a couple of things. Let me just summarize for the audience.

Number one, the trust issue. Yeah. Here's the good news.

I think we're at this boundary portion right now where we're still kind of figuring out the trust. I think over time, we'll learn to trust it more. It'll get better.

Yeah. And we'll trust it more. Yeah.

But secondly, I think the question or the issue you raised to me is the human in the loop and then human at the helm issues. Mm-hmm. Because I think the other part about AI and these agents and so forth doing this is the scale and speed- Yeah ...

that they bring to it- Oh, yeah ... outstrips most of our systems, whether you're talking about security or data or ingesting data and so on. Yeah.

They were built for human speed. Yes. And we now have to learn to operate at AI speed.

Yes. But we can't let it just run amok. No.

We still need, there are certain things, as you said- Yeah ... where you need that human in the loop. Yeah, like if you are literally using it for personal productivity, and you look up the answer, and you're like, "Eh," that's a little different than if you are setting it- Right ...

to go because you're taking those errors, and you're scaling them instantly. And right. And when you scale an error, it's bad.

Yeah. So I do think we're grappling- Yeah ... all around with that human in the loop.

How do we- Because that's really the issue, is how do we move-- If everything we're going to move still at the same speed we've been doing- Mm-hmm ... I think we'll be okay. But it's not.

We see it with this mythos with vulnerabilities and security. Yeah. We're finding 100X more vulnerabilities than we did before.

How do we deal with that? Yeah. But it is, again, I do think it's part of this transit.

There's a phase. Yeah. Because I feel like we're at this interesting phase where our ambition- Mm-hmm ...

is not fully being met with our pace. We're a little ahead of our skis. Yeah.

Totally, right, because there's this interesting MIT study that showed when you ask people what percentage of their jobs, their tasks are going to be automated, and people believe in three years, close to 50% is going to be automated. Right? A lot of people- I think that's conservative.

That's true. I think it's conservative. Totally, right.

And then you ask them, we did a study actually with decision-makers and with analysts, 1,400 of them, and we asked, how many of you actually trust the decisions? And about 20%, right? Yeah.

That right there is the disconnect. And of 20% trust the autonomous decisions. Really?

Yeah. More than the humans. Yeah, 3%.

Oh, so you're surprised by the three. Yeah. Well, probably three to five, you're right.

Yeah. Because there are people who just always trust the machine more than the human. That's true.

It's interesting. Yeah. Is that study available, by the way?

Yeah. I think it's going out this week. Yeah, so we just did a- Actually, yeah.

So you know what? I know there's lots of announcements here this week. Yeah.

Some are under embargo, if I'm not mistaken, until Wednesday the 20th. I was privy to them. That's what you get when you sit on this side of the camera.

So I've already actually written articles that are all queued and ready. But there is some good stuff going up. Yeah.

Looking out for that. If you don't mind, Michelle- Mm-hmm ... I want to now focus into marketing, right?

Yeah. I talk to a lot of my friends in tech. The tip of the spear of this AI revolution, in my mind, is two places really big in tech.

Coders, right? Yep. People writing code and people doing marketing.

Those are the two kind of professions that are at the tip of the spear where AI seems to be accelerating beyond what it does in other areas. Oh, yeah. How is it- So what are we doing?

What are you doing? Yeah. You're the CMO.

This is your gig, right? Yeah. What are we doing?

Yeah. So, it's interesting. So as a company, our CEO even has this mandate, which is really trying to encourage and give us an environment, all the different departments, to experiment, to see what works from your own standpoint, but how do we actually change maybe how we work from each department.

So CMO, kind of looking at the marketing organization, we have a strategy that we align to, which is called B2Mom. And so when I think about our plan for the year, one of the big things that I'm doing is around how do we reimagine how we work in marketing using Alteryx and AI. So it's a big kind of changing those things.

And so maybe the three ways I think about it is, from a technology, there's how do we just use a lot of the out-of-the-box AI capabilities and different technology that's built. So for example, if you go to Alteryx website, you'll see Annie pop up on the page. I love that.

And Annie is an AI agent. And some of the things that we've always heard is people are used to chat bots. Right.

It's been on the website for a long time. But oftentimes you go and you're just not ready to talk to a sales rep, but you're just wondering- You're just exploring ... having a little conversation.

You're exploring it. You can read and you can listen to stuff, but having a conversation is interesting sometimes. And so Annie pops up and she can have a whole conversation.

She's trained, she can give little demos. And so there's an interesting way that we're trying to really use AI in different ways to provide a better experience for people who come to the sites. Look, my experience is some of those are fantastic and some of them, I just say representative.

You've seen that commercial, right? Yeah. So is the technology powering Amy Alteryx technology?

Yeah. So this is packaged out of the box. So we actually have one of our vendors, One Mind- Okay ...

actually the vendor that does that. And so, we do use Alteryx in combination with- That's what I wanted to see. So- ...

different vendors, yeah ... drinking your own champagne, eating your own dog food, whatever you want to call it. Yeah.

Where is that going? Yeah. So there's a roadmap for Annie, and all the different ways that we have different AI agents for that kind of first-time experience.

We also just launched one for existing customers who are just kind of needing to be onboarded and better understand the experience. And so there's kind of almost a customer success type of agent. And then we have one that's for SEs.

And so with the customer success one, we're looking at different ways of taking data and making sure that the agent actually has a more personalized understanding of the customer. From the kind of Annie having all the different conversations, do you remember the early days of when you used to call, the first time when CRMs started coming out, and you would talk to someone on the phone? Yes.

" And then giving your name and your problem again. " Always frustrating. Can you just forward?

Yeah. And so from what people are having conversations with Annie, a lot of times we don't want that to just not go anywhere. Right.

" And so we're taking a lot of that data and using- Amazing ... a metric standpoint of how do we make sure that we find interesting conversations and then share it with the rep, so that when they actually do book a meeting, that they have all that context kind of ready for them. But that's the way it should be.

And not only that, everybody's talking about training these AIs. Where do we get the data? That's the best data to train it on, real-life customer data- Oh, yeah.

It's all great for learning ... that's for you. Yes.

Exactly. From a human- Makes it better. Definitely.

I've got to ask you the hard question. Yeah. How's your team responding to this?

Are they embracing it? Yeah. So there's definitely everyone's kind of seeing, okay, their existing applications, what are you actually learning?

And then there's ones where, from a personal productivity tool- Mm-hmm ... maybe you and I were talking a little earlier, there's definitely people who, early adopters, pushing it to the edge. Yeah.

" And there's other ones where maybe, I think the hard thing with marketing, maybe a lot of jobs, is you're just so heads down focused on trying to do the job, that carving out time to experiment and play can get really hard for people. And so I think that people are all different kind of paces, I feel like. Right.

No, I think you've got to take your people as they are. Some people are that 15% early adopters. Some are early mainstream, some are laggards.

Yeah. As we were talking off camera, as I said, I told my people, "You're not losing your job to AI. " Yeah.

So I'm not saying run headlong. Make sure there's water in the swimming pool before you dive in. Yeah.

But don't not go swimming. Yeah. Well, because what I want to do is with my organization, if you think about just one day if you're not with the company anymore, you go to your next career opportunity, usually the first question is, "So what did you do?

Tell me about your role. " Totally. And have that opportunity, because you'd be compared against all the other candidates and what they had real-world experience with.

No, I think from a personal journey standpoint, absolutely. Yeah. Last question and I'm going to let you go because we're probably way over time.

But you were the first one and I had to ask some things. If you don't mind looking into that camera. Yeah.

Eight thousand plus customers. Yep. Seven hundred and fifty thousand people in the community.

Yep. Tell them why Alteryx is staying on top of solving their problems using latest technologies like AI, agentics, et cetera. Yeah.

So we have this amazing community. We're actually here at the event, and one of the things, the reason why it's called Inspire, is we hear from so many people it's not just about the technology, it's about the use cases and how you're doing it. And so everyone here is about sharing what they learn.

And so the benefits of having this community, 760,000 people, is that you can really learn from others and really take not just solving traditional day-to-day jobs, but what does that look like now in this new AI era? And we have all these innovations coming out. We have hands-on labs so that people can really start showing.

We have new starter kits that are AI-enabled so that people can take this, start tinkering, start applying it in their job, and it's really what we want to do is just bring it for the customers and our users. And for people who are not customers or in the community yet- Yeah ... what's the best on-ramp?

What's the path for them to get involved? Yeah. Well, come to our website.

So check out, we actually have virtual Inspire going on if you just want to come in and- Right ... take a hearing of that and talk to Annie. She can give you a little- That's right ...

little download. Subscribe to our LinkedIn channel. So lots of different ways, but would love to just make sure that we can share more with you- I love it ...

on this journey. Michelle, thank you so much. Best of luck here because nine months is still sort of new.

Yeah, right. And I'll be looking forward to seeing more. Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me on. All right. Hey, we're here at Inspire 2026.

Michelle Huff, CMO for Alteryx. Well, I always have Alteryx. Is the right name or Alteryx?

Alteryx, yeah. Alteryx. Okay.

It's my funny accent. Anyway, we've got a lot more coming. Stay tuned.

We'll be back in a bit.