By Cathy Rose A. Garcia, Editor-in-Chief
DALLAS, Texas — Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way businesses operate around the world, but Boomi Chief Executive Officer Steve Lucas says real digital transformation must be human-centric to be truly successful.
At last month’s Boomi World, Mr. Lucas said it is important to make sure that people are still at the center of AI-driven transformation.
“I believe it would be the most profound and productive decade in the next 10 years. I believe humans truly will live longer, healthier lives thanks to AI. All of us will benefit from that. But we have to stop and contemplate what societal, what business impacts AI will have,” he said.
In his best-selling book “Digital Impact: The Human Element of AI-driven Transformation,” Mr. Lucas said it would be a mistake to focus on AI without considering how it affects people.
“AI and automation are powerful but their success hinges on one thing: The people who use them. Without a human-centric approach, even the most advanced technology will fail,” he added.
A self-described AI optimist, Mr. Lucas said AI will unlock more opportunities for businesses and the world.
However, he warned that those who lack a strategy for taking advantage of the technology will not be able to compete.
“For every one Blockbuster Video, that one cautionary tale, there will be 100,000 Blockbusters thanks to AI… I know that that may not be the most popular opinion, but it’s true. AI will create such incredibly productive environments that organizations that are relying on humans alone or deterministic process alone, you won’t be able to compete… We’re not talking 10 years from now, we’re talking five,” he said.
Integration and automation are essential for businesses to get the most out of AI, he added.
HUGE OPPORTUNITYExecutives at Boomi, a leading integration and automation company, said they want to make AI more practical for businesses.
Matt McLarty, chief technology officer (CTO) at Boomi, said AI will help augment human capabilities, not replace humans.
“I’m definitely in the camp of yes, AI is a huge, huge opportunity but it’s here to help us, not replace us,” he told BusinessWorld in an interview.
The Boomi platform can be a good entryway for companies that are hesitant to adopt AI, he said, noting it provides a practical and intuitive way to experiment with AI without requiring a significant investment.
“This whole velocity of innovation around AI is so crazy. Trying to keep pace with it is challenging. At the same time, our customers and organizations are still back here saying, wait for us, what do we do,” Mr. McLarty said.
Markus Mueller, global field CTO for application programming interface (API) management at Boomi, said the company is taking the lead in making sure that enterprises make use of AI through the platform.
“Where we lead is practical AI — bringing AI into the enterprise and making it usable — because a lot of the other companies that you find in the AI space, they do great stuff, they do great research, but they don’t excel in making it usable in the companies today,” he told BusinessWorld.
At Boomi World, the company unveiled new product innovations such as the general availability of Agentstudio, new AI agents, the addition of Boomi Data Integration to the enterprise platform, as well as support for Model Context Protocol.
For instance, users can design, govern and orchestrate AI agents at scale within a no-code environment on Boomi Agentstudio. AI agents are software entities that use AI to perform tasks or services autonomously or semi-autonomously, based on programming, learned behavior and data.
Mr. McLarty said they expect it to be a “very common thing” to have Boomi customers build their own agents.
“Because of the pace of change that’s going on out there, every organization needs to be fairly experimental with things… I think just by the democratized nature of our platform, it makes it easy to experiment… Like, you can try things out, you can experiment with this new technology in a way that’s intuitive, but also you don’t feel like you just had to invest in a whole data science team,” he added.
DIGITAL FRAGMENTATIONHowever, one of the biggest challenges facing enterprises in their transformation journey is digital fragmentation.
Mani Gill, vice-president for product management at Boomi, said data management has always been a critical issue for organizations, and more important than ever with the rise of AI agents.
“Organizations rely on data to make decisions, run their businesses, and operate their businesses. And now AI agents are thirsty for data, otherwise, these agents are not going to operate properly,” Mr. Gill told BusinessWorld, noting agents will need context for the data.
Boomi last month announced the general availability of Boomi DataHub Command Center, a new module within the Boomi DataHub, that consolidates data management tools, simplifies governance and presents real-time data views.
“Data and AI go hand in hand. Data foundation is super important to successful AI projects, and AI is super important to automate and integrate organizations and businesses… That is partly why we want to democratize the use of building agents and make it available to all of our customers,” Mr. Gill said.
Another challenge for organizations is dealing with the “sprawl problem” when handling significant amounts of data and applications.
“Being able to deal effectively with complexity is probably the main thing that organizations need to do… We have embraced the complexity, so it does make us a natural platform for that,” Mr. McLarty said.
“But the underlying message is there’s no silver bullet. It is a lot of work to deal with the complexity that’s there. But that’s where the opportunity is.”