Gartner defines AI application development platforms as those that offer the required technology and workflows to design, build, test and deploy AI-embedded applications. These platforms provide access to foundation models and the capability to ground and place guardrails around them. Software engineering teams utilize these platforms to build AI applications, such as assistants, agents and multimodal applications. Software engineering leaders face increasing pressure to incorporate AI into their products. AI application development platforms host the necessary tooling for enterprise developers to build AI assistants, agents and multimodal apps without extensive knowledge of machine learning. AI application development platforms focus on providing the features developers need to ground models with organizational knowledge. They also reduce risk by implementing responsible AI processes and guardrails within their AI-embedded applications. These platforms help scale the development of AI-embedded applications by offering governance, evaluation metrics and support throughout the application life cycle. Not every platform will offer access to first-party models or application-testing capabilities.
The application development life cycle management (ADLM) tool market focuses on the planning and governance activities of the software development life cycle (SDLC). ADLM products focus on the 'development' portion of an application's life. Key elements of an ADLM solution include: software requirements definition and management, software change and configuration management, software project planning, with a current focus on agile planning, work item management, quality management, including defect management. Other key capabilities include: reporting, workflow, integration to version management, support for wikis and collaboration, strong facilities for integration to other ADLM tools.