#271 Steve Lucas: Why AI Agents Will Automate 75% of Business Operations by 2026

This episode is sponsored by Oracle. OCI is the next-generation cloud designed for every workload – where you can run any application, including any AI projects, faster and more securely for less. On average, OCI costs 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking. Join Modal, Skydance Animation, and today's innovative AI tech companies who upgraded to OCI…and saved. Try OCI for free at http://oracle.com/eyeonai What if the future of enterprise wasn't human-driven, but agent-driven? In this groundbreaking episode, Steve Lucas, CEO of Boomi, unveils a radical vision for the next era of business: one where AI agents will power 75% of enterprise operations by 2026. From eliminating traditional user interfaces to transforming legacy systems with no-code automation, Steve walks us through how Boomi is building the infrastructure for a self-driving enterprise, and why businesses that fail to prepare will be left behind. This episode will shift your perspective on where the enterprise is headed and who (or what) will be running it. Stay Updated: Craig Smith on X:https://x.com/craigss Eye on A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You'll have an intelligent agent that knows who you are, your job, what you do, your company, and it'll say, "Hey, just FYI, three expense reports came in. I already approved them. Let me know if you need anything." We will build that agent for you. No code. You just describe your intent and we build the agent. That's the great equalizer. You can build an agent that does my job. I could be a little worried, but okay. You could do that, but if you can't govern it, you can't manage it, you can't observe it in real time, it won't matter.

• 0:29Craig S. Smith?

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• 1:15Craig S. Smith?

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• 1:54Craig S. Smith?

  Head to oracle.com/eyeonai. Eye on AI, all run together, E Y E O N A I. That's oracle.com/eyeonai.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  So I'm Steve Lucas. I've been in enterprise software for thirty years. It's terrifying to say, but thirty years. I got my start at Microsoft at a very young age.

• 2:22Craig S. Smith?

  High school, it looks.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, a solid fifty-two years old and counting. But, uh, but I, I, all I've done is software and I, I love it. I love everything about enterprise software. I love the transformative nature of it. So that I love. Um, I've led three companies as CEO, uh, Boomi, I Sims and, um, and Marketo, so three of those organizations. And in doing that, uh, you know, prior to that, my gosh, I was the president of Platform Group at SAP. Uh, prior to that, I, uh, was, uh, the SVP of Force.com, that's Salesforce.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  So I had a lot of what I call platform-specific roles, um, in my career. Um, but if you look at how I got to Boomi, which we'll, we'll get there in a moment. A lot of it has to do with, um, every business I've run, whether it's at a large company or as CEOs. It's been a platform business of some sort.

• 3:24Craig S. Smith?

  And a SaaS.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, a hundred percent like, I, I mean, I, I would say I got involved in cloud like super early on. At Business Objects, like way back when they were a business intelligence and analytics company. In two thousand and, I, I think it was thirty, I don't, I don't want to fit the year, three or two thousand three or four. I launched crystalreports.com, which was the world's first cloud-native reporting solution. That's over twenty years ago. And at the time, it felt super cutting edge and I was using in my, my pitch to the board. I was using cutting-edge metaphors like, we take pictures of data. So with a digital camera, take pictures and post them with Flickr, if you remember.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  Analogy totally worked at the time.

• 4:13Craig S. Smith?

  Uh, so, uh, and, and Boomi, uh, was started in two thousand six, I want to say, when.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, Boomi was founded roughly 20 years ago.

• 4:26Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  And the founding of the company was based on a simple observation, which is none of these major software vendors, not Oracle, or SAP, or Microsoft, or even Salesforce at the time, want to talk to each other. None of their systems talk to each other. The data is not compatible. Well, that's not super helpful because every customer on the planet needs them to talk to each other.

• 4:50Craig S. Smith?

  Right.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  So Boomi solved that very painful problem of fragmentation and complexity by bringing an integration platform. So that, I mean, at the time, that was kind of mind blowing. Holy cow, I don't have to build all this myself. It was kind of like 40 years ago, or 30 years ago, companies actually wrote their own email servers or their own database as well. Forty years ago. No one does that anymore. And similarly, there's no sense in building all your own integrations by hand painstakingly. We have an integration platform. So that was the innovative thing we delivered 20 years ago.

• 5:25Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and I'm going to ask you to tip the, the, the thing. Yeah, yeah, that's better. Yeah. And the integrate, what were they integrating 20 years ago?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  So, well, 20 years ago, I think conceptually, a lot of the same things we see today. Applications, databases, those were the things that needed to be connected in order to build business processes and improve business outcomes. And the whole notion was like, if you can take the analogy of I, I get an order from a website, then I need to process that order through an SAP system, and then I need to fulfill it through any logistics type of application. All of those things need to have the data move from system to system, from order management to fulfillment, all the way to shipping logistics, et cetera. Well, that, that data or sets of data packages, most systems, like in SAP natively,

• 6:23Speaker 00

  they'll help you as long as it stays with an SAP. Oracle will help you as long as it stays with Oracle, but good luck once it's, you know, kind of outside the four walls, so to speak. And that's where Boomi shines. We can literally connect everything to everything.

• 6:38Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and the, and I'm gonna do a, at the end, we'll do a screen share of the platform and then I'll fold it and while we're talking for the video.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:52Craig S. Smith?

  In those days, you weren't handling AI applications or systems. So how did that change? First of all, the supervised learning craze. When everyone was labeling data. I've worked with a couple of platforms, one called Label Box. That would take the data from your data store and then put it in front of the labelers with all these tools and then pass it along. Uh, did you guys handle labeling or or did you have supervised learning workflows that you were working on?

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so oh, yeah, we sure did. But like, I I think this is worth sixty seconds of a walk down memory.

• 7:37Craig S. Smith?

  Sure.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  So here we go. So, you know, in the beginning, whether it was on premise or in the cloud, we had applications and databases and various standards that come and gone for how do I connect these things? Everything from uh, you know, the the old school days, already be seeing, you know, open databases. Uh, kind of a compatibility protocol, so that or communication protocol. So those those things have come and gone. And then you have uh, enterprise, you know, system bus architectures and all this other things that came along. Um, Boomi has existed through all of those, especially the past twenty years kind of phases. Well, as we had applications proliferate and databases proliferate.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Then we had the API economy, right? Everybody kind of in a in a good way, put APIs in front of everything. Yeah. Well, then application or APIs proliferate. So now you have tons of apps, tons of databases, tons of APIs, and Boomi has evolved with all of that, where we've said, hey, our platform allows you to get your arms around all of your apps, your databases and your APIs. And integrate those in a single layer. Now, why that's special and powerful is I'm not writing bespoke code. I'm not using bespoke connectors every time. I need to move data payloads between all these things. So that's the the beautiful part. Now, to your point, well, then what about AI?

• 9:04Speaker 00

  First of all, AI is fueled by data. So that's

• 9:07Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  irrespective of the era. But so that's always been good for us. But even probably 10 years ago, we were building machine learning technologies to do things like automatically link data, as you can imagine, when you do a table join. Something fairly straightforward or simple. You actually have to know, so which which elements in each table, you know, match if you're going to create, you know, links to to run a sequel query. So we we had AI that would actually automatically link tables, even if they were from different databases, different applications, whatever that may be. So for us, we've been building machine learning types of technologies for quite some time.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  We've also been collecting metadata about customer processes. So think about, I'm a large beer manufacturer, right? So I make beer and I ship. Pretty simple. But the logistics of manufacturing process, not so simple. So I'm building thousand step processes at a time that require connecting many systems to many systems, and you're building these complex processes. So our technology, we we were actually capturing and genericizing. So it's anonymized. The metadata about those processes, thinking someday it might be good to train AI on this data, right? That was 10 years ago.

• 10:34Speaker 00

  Today, we have nearly 400 million unique processes that we've categorized, characterized that we're now training AI on. So it makes sense now, right? So we did all that through the process. We've evolved, the the platform has been, you know, rewritten, modernized multiple times to embrace new technology. And here we are today in this era of generative AI, pre-trained transformers and the like. This was like a a a perfect world for Omi. Because AI and agents, which I know we'll talk about, it needs data from your apps and your databases and your APIs. It needs context like models.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  We've even, and and just one more thing on your question, we've even, you know, at the time, we we built a data catalog product. We we were part of the whole data cataloging, how to label your data process. I think all that stuff and and we're going to be part of that as well as is going to be replaced by AI. Why would I want a human to do things like build an ontology for me manually?

• 11:36Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  It's just AI for that. So, yes, we've been there, done that. I should have said that. That would have been much shorter answer to your question. Yes.

• 11:44Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and

• 11:47Craig S. Smith?

  when they, even with AI, uh, on- once you started integrating APIs into a platform, make the platform conversant with APIs. Most, uh, the, the, the big model providers are all going towards APIs. So how how different is it? And I'm not talking about integration of AI into the product, but in handling workflows that include AI. If it's, if you're hitting models by API, it doesn't really change your processor platform, does it?

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Well, no, I mean, I, I think that the, the lingua franca for all AI is APIs, right? That's how they talk to each other. They talk to other systems. The beautiful part about what we offer, when I say, you know, like API management, Boomi, what it means is you could take any system, hyper-modern, super antiquated, and you can wrap a series of APIs around it, allow me to talk to you, simply, right? This is a profound transformation, especially for legacy systems. There's a lot of banks that I talk to, but they have systems that are still sitting, they're literally, they were written in cobalt.

• 13:01Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  The guy that wrote it is on a beach somewhere in Florida, and there's no one around to support it. So how do you get a modern interface on a relatively ancient system, right? So, things like agents can interact with that, you know, in a modern fashion. Well, that's what Boomi specializes in. We can connect to those legacy systems. We can then apply modern APIs to those systems and allow it to interact with the modern world. So kind of like, what's old is new. So we can do that amongst many things. That is super critical in the world that we're talking about, right? If you want agents, modern AI, to interact with

• 13:42Speaker 00

  Banking systems, you better be prepared to have an integration platform that can kind of do the translation. I'm sure someday there will be some capability where AI will be able to say, hey, just talk to it for me and then I'll figure it out, but we're nowhere near that.

• 13:57Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that's an interesting point. Are you working on that?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:02Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, I would guess.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  I mean, the transformation, look, it's going to go from, you know, I have enterprise applications, databases and APIs, and I need an integration layer. Absolutely. There will be an agent fabric, an agent orchestration layer, where instead of me saying, well, I have all these systems of record and the like, and then I have an integration here, and that will always exist for what I would characterize as like classic enterprise software. But there will be a day where I will just say to a swarm of AI agents that have expertise, like one agent will speak Cobol.

• 14:41Craig S. Smith?

  Right.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Another will speak ABAP from SAP, right? It will, these will speak these things. We will be able to direct those agent swarms to go do things like connect to this system and produce this outcome for me. So I will describe my intent. And then our, our platform will orchestrate this swarm of agents to go do that for you. So less like, you know, connect this thing and it's very rigid and it's much more flexible, but I, I think an agent fabric will.

• 15:11Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And this question might be naive. But, but there is a class of companies called systems integrators that work to integrate.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:25Craig S. Smith?

  Different. Is, does this replace that? Or are they the customers for this sort of thing?

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Well, I think system integrators, I I hope they will be the innovators for this kind of thing. Here's what's going to happen, I think, with all system integrators. The system integrator today is defined as large consultancy with a specific set of expertise. It could be an industry or many or a technology at any. And then a ridiculous number of human consultants.

• 15:54Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  There is not an SI out there that isn't already replacing consultants with agents. And by the way, they'll still bill by the app.

• 16:05Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  So that's still going to happen, right? It's just going to be an agent by the hour. So their profit margin, if you think about traditional consulting, why why have software companies stayed away from? You know, having big consulting, well, because the margins are low, right? They are, right? So the margin high, human margin low. Well, what if the humans are consultants are replaced over time by agents? Well, now you've got a ridiculously high margin for an agent high for you. That's an irresistible proposition for SIs. They will most not will, they are doing that.

• 16:38Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. But they could use, they're not building their own platforms necessarily.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  No, well, some are some are building kind of these like agent factories that will produce lots of agents. I look, I think every company like a Boomi, we're building agents that are kind of in our wheelhouse, right? We're an integration company. We build integration agents. We have an integration player. We have an agent agentic platform that allows our customers to build integration agents. So we build them, our customers will build them. So every company is kind of be in their wheelhouse. However, what AI does is it gives you the ability to also look around and you step out, yeah, outside your wheelhouse a little bit and do more. I think the biggest impact in the short to medium term across all of software, it's not going to be with the SIs.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  What it's going to be with is we're going to see the user interface layer that enterprise software companies like a Salesforce, Oracle, S A P have dominated.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  They they count on, they are used to you as a human logging in. You do things and then you log out. You won't do that anymore. You'll you'll literally, you'll have an intelligent agent that knows who you are, your job, what you do, your company. And it'll say, hey, just FYI, three expense reports came in. I already approved them. Let me know if you need anything. That's the experience I think when I want. I don't want to, no offense, but I want to log into an expense report system and try and remember how to do that. Like, who cares, right? So that that future we're we're heading for, the user interface layer is going to be rested from all major enterprise software companies and replaced with AI.

• 18:24Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. You were talking about the consultation and of system integrators. Part of that is understanding the landscape of applications and configurations and data products. And then advising a client, okay, you need this, this, and this. You guys are sort of agnostic, right? About about what's getting plugged in. How do people know what they should plug in? Is is that up to the the CISO or CTO at a company?

• 19:06Craig S. Smith?

  Or do you think that AI will take over that? Where you could ask Chad, maybe an agent, but certainly a general model or maybe a fine tuned model. You know, this is my business process. What tools would be best to automate this workflow? And then, you know, I can then use Boomi. I'll grab these tools or or Boomi on the platform. The tools are listed, right? You're not, you're not pulling in, but you can, I imagine, pull them in from outside.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Well, I I think that, so I think companies that deliver capabilities like process discovery are in a uniquely good position, right? So process discovery technology generally will do things like run against tons of system logs and figure out what is your actual business process.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  And then it will give you kind of a mind map, if you will, or process flows saying, well, here's your business process, right? It could be order to fulfillment and it'll discover that. That process discovery, those tools and technologies kind of become the prompts for AI in the enterprise, right? So you use it, you'll use process discovery to create prompts. Then from those prompts, you can ask AI, now make a better one. What should my process be? That's where, you know, us collecting hundreds of millions of indexed processes over the past decade across 23,000 companies, it gives us kind of a unique mode that we actually know.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  We've already built an AI agent where I can actually say, create a fulfillment process for me. It looks across at near half billion processes and go, well, here's the best one. So it's going to be a unique thing where I think process discovery vendors will be kind of like the enterprise prompt vendors. They'll find it, share it. And then integration platforms, specifically Boomi, will be the optimized creators.

• 21:14Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah. You mentioned, how many companies did you mention? 240,000 or what, or 24,000? 23,000, I'm sorry, I'll cut out. Yeah.

• 21:30Craig S. Smith?

  The, this is part of the broader digital transformation of the economy. And that, a lot of people assume that's gone a lot faster than it has. How do you see that? I mean, how, how big is the market for Boomi? I know you guys are growing very fast.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, we are. Well, so first of all, I think, I mean, digital transformation, as you and I know, is a loosely defined term, right? Originally, digital transformation was, you have paper, let's be digital. Now, digital transformation means something more than that. It means let's be modern. I think we're going to see that term shift from digital transformation to agentic transformation. It will be the dominant term in the enterprise. Two years ago, when I was talking about AI agents, I think there were, I was met with a lot of eyeball rolls, like, we'll see that in five years. But I think Santa Altman and his band of merry women and men have proven right is that agents will transform the enterprise.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  It's not, it's beyond something now. So as we move from digital transformation, paper to digital, to agentic transformation, digital to agent driven. To me, what that really means is we're going to see the rise of the self-driving enterprise. And I don't mean fully, but you think, whatever, pick your electric car. You know, the, the, you know, the reality is all electric cars started with kind of like super cruise control on the highway. And then eventually stop on their own, light turns, we can go on their own. So we're seeing that, well, this is exactly how enterprises will evolve with agents. We'll see them self-drive on the highway.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  But eventually you'll see an enterprise where a series of agents just build the income statement and balance sheet for you. Why would I want humans doing that anyway? Proved to errors, a long list of things. You'll see things like the approval processes for soul-crushing work, like expense report approval. You can tell I don't like expense report. Or, you know, hires in an HR system. But that will all become self-driving aspects of, of, of AI within the enterprise. So that's exactly how this is going to evolve. So, you know, I just, I look at what, what we do is, you know, the, all of these kind of existing apps, databases and APIs. And at this layer, and then above that are the agents working.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  But an individual agent, much like a human, it doesn't know how to connect to a hundred different systems. That's where we come in. It doesn't know what this API means. Well, that's where we come in. It doesn't have enterprise context. If I said to an agent, um, what's my forecast? Well, what do you mean? You mean sales forecast, retention, uh, you know, the weather? Uh, well, what system is that in? Is it Clary? Is it Salesforce? Is it NetSuite? Is it, what, what is it, right? And so that context matters. That's where we come in. So we can give agents connectivity, so authentication, authorization, connectivity, um, context. That is the fuel for a successful enterprise right now.

• 24:47Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and who, what level of enterprise are you targeting?

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Um, what target?

• 24:58Craig S. Smith?

  Is this? Is this Fortune one hundred, Fortune five hundred, or anything making more than a hundred million in annual revenue?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Well, we we certainly like those, but we have twenty three thousand customers all over the world. Um, speaking hundreds of languages with, you know, you know, all different kinds of currencies. Um, our aim.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Look, I would love to have Walmart as a customer.

• 25:26Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  I would. But I view Boomi's job as something slightly different than that. Look, the average company, most companies, they're not going to be Walmart, spending billions of dollars on AI research.

• 25:39Craig S. Smith?

  Right.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  And look, the the technology age already allowed Walmart to, you know, with hyperscale technologies, to gut all their competitors, the road is littered, I think, unfortunately, with tens of thousands of mom and pop retail shops that couldn't compete with the Walmarts in the world. That was just the technology era. Now we're in AI. Walmart is spending, as I said, billions, forget billions, tens of billions of dollars on transforming their whole business, optimizing with AI. Who in retail is going to survive that? So I view our role as to be the great equalizer, to give companies that, and I'm not trying to vilify Walmart.

• 26:20Craig S. Smith?

  No, of course.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  We give companies that are not Walmart the ability to run their business with AI hyper efficiently. It's why we built our, not not just the ability to connect all these systems, literally, we are are making available, generally available on March twenty first, the ability for any of our customers with no coding expertise whatsoever to build their own AI agents. I can describe my intent, I just talked about. And we create agents that do that. So if I described intent as I want to run a promotion for any new customer that comes in through my website, we will literally build an agent that does that. And you go, well, hang on a second. I thought Boomi was an integration platform. Yes.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  And AI can do anything for you, right? So I could describe an agent that I could say, hey, anytime I have a shipper that cancels an order, they can't, can't deliver for me. Automatically find another one that's a lower cost that meets my customer requirements. We will build that agent for you. No code. You just describe your intent and we build the agent. That's the great equalizer for everyone that's not Walmart.

• 27:30Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And so what's that product going to be called?

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Agent Studio.

• 27:34Craig S. Smith?

  Agent Studio and.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  We've been calling it a long time.

• 27:37Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, uh, the, the, uh, uh.

• 27:43Craig S. Smith?

  What's happening under the hood? Are you, are you, uh, are you using other companies, agent building platforms and who are you using? And I assume you're using model context protocol and there are all these different protocols uh, coming up. I was just.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we're super buzzword compliant on that front. So we have all kinds of, of interesting things. So first of all, we're actually using third party models, for example, like Llama, but not limited to. And what we've done is we took models and we taught those models how to build the agent. So it's models that build agents that use models, if you kind of get the circular reference, right? Um, the second thing we trained them on is our hundreds of millions of business processes that we, you know, over time. So they understand how these processes work. We trained them on things like, uh, how to interact with API, applications, the databases, all using the existing Boomi platform.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  So when I describe intent, that, that prompt in English is passed to one of our models that, you know, we fine tuned. And then those models produce what it believes to be the best agent for your business. Aware of the fact that you're already using the Boomi platform. So all that just happens automatically. We do that. We then create the agent. So I put this in any business process you want. That's where I think the game changing magic comes in. A customer that built, you know, processes to like, connect a bunch of apps. But we now they go, holy cow, I can use that same work to create these models that these these agents that do anything.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  Which begs the question, let's, I used to run, I was the CEO of Marketo, marketing automation.

• 29:31Craig S. Smith?

  Well.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Very specific product that automates marketing, sends emails, runs over a campaign, right? What if I could use Boomi to build an agent that does that? Do we need Marketo with you? Those are the kind of questions that you ask. And and by the way, yes, a ton of protocols coming out like model context protocol.

• 29:53Craig S. Smith?

  Right.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  It's literally is like, I can give a model context for my application. That's going to be a huge player in um, in the world of AI and agents. But I do have, I have a little bit of a beef with MCP and here it is. So Anthropic comes out in like November of twenty twenty four, right? Hey, any application vendor out there can give our model context about your application. Oh, well, thank you, Anthropic. That's truly altruistic, right? Think about it. What I just mentioned, which AI becomes the new UI. Well, this is an easy way for Anthropic to say, hey, just hang out in Claude, use it all day and we'll talk to SAP for you. We'll handle the expense report approval.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  And then what makes me even more squinty eyed is then OpenAI and Anthropic and OpenAI do not like each other. Then OpenAI says, we're going to support MCP. And then Google says, we're going to support MCP, right? So all the major model players out there are supporting MCP. They're doing it because it aids the the extraction or removal of the classic user interface and puts them atop it. If you think it's anything noble, it's not. It's just, it's selfish at the end. And and look, and it, the toothpaste is out of the tube. This is going to happen. So we of course support MCP. We'll continue to do it. And you have other companies like Google comes out with agent to agent protocol.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Look the world and and Boomi is going to release a number of capabilities here as well. This is something we're just redefining right now in real time. We're literally redefining how processes, workflow and more will work in the enterprise. So you're going to see hundreds of protocols come out.

• 31:36Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And back on penetration, um, what, how is Boomi priced and, and how small a company can take advantage of this?

• 31:49Speaker 00

  We have companies with, you know, 25, 50 employees using Boomi. Um, and by the way, our message to every single one of our customers, if you want to scale more efficiently in the future using AI, it doesn't mean fire humans at all. It might mean fire less going forward because of the efficiency of our platform. Um, so we, our, our model is really simple. We have two very simple models. One is it's just an all you can eat platform model. So you literally get every product we make. And then just depending on how much data you move in and out of the platform, it's literally like a power for your, use everything, go transform your business, the more of it you use, and we make

• 32:34Speaker 00

  slightly more. Um, then we have a second model that's kind of more of a, what's called a connector based model, which is if you have a limited number of systems that you want to connect to, that works as well, but it's super easy to do not. In fact, you'd actually go get a 90 day trial on the entire Boomi platform for nothing.

• 32:51Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And this will, both of these, uh,

• 32:58Craig S. Smith?

  categories will have access to the agent studio.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Of course. Yeah, it's included. So we're, you know, on, on May 24th, we will make so our agent builder, which is part of the agent studio. We also have something called agent control tower. I'll get to that. Agent builder is create unlimited agents. All of our customers will be able to build unlimited AI agents. Now deploying them costs money. Um, you can deploy a certain number for free and then if you want to, it'll be on that. But you can build as many as you want, which is pretty cool because the experimentation is there. The reality, and I think the question that begs to be asked is, What happens when there are millions, billions, tens of billions of agents?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  So we humans who have been the gods in this scenario, we cede much of that ground to AI.

• 33:53Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 00

  Who's watching the AI? When do humans get pulled into the loop, that human in the loop kind of concept? So we built a technology called Agent Control Tower. We actually built this on the AWS platform, co-invented with Amazon. And it quite simply, it's like, think about it as an air traffic control tower of watching all the airplanes and movement and stuff, that kind of thing. I'm not on the ground watching one plane, I'm watching all of them on radar. Our control tower will have five agents or five million. At one company allows you to watch all agents, decisions they're making. Are they hallucinating? Are they overlapping, costing you tons of money?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Are there a duplicative insights that they keep accessing when they shouldn't be? And you can literally turn on or off feature by feature. You can govern what agents have access to and what they don't. I think the control tower is, it's the must have, because look, change only happens at the speed of trust with humans. Doesn't matter how great of an agent, you can build an agent that does my job for me, right? I'd be a little worried, but okay. You could do that, but if you can't govern it, can't manage it, you can't observe it in real time, it won't matter. Try a hospital for five minutes, right? You can't afford for an AI agent to be like 90% accurate.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  It doesn't work that way in a hospital or a bank or whatever. It might work that way in customer service and support. Like I take a, if I don't have to do, if I don't have any hold time on a phone and it's 90% accurate, hallelujah. Except at a hospital.

• 35:35Craig S. Smith?

  Sure. Yeah. How long do you think it'll take? I mean, you know, everyone's talking about agents and there are all kinds of companies popping up that specialize in agents.

• 35:53Craig S. Smith?

  But there's still, you said it moves at the speed of trust. There's still, there's a lot of experimentation, but there's not a lot of production. But everyone can see.

• 36:06Craig S. Smith?

  You know, the day will come when all of these sort of routine processes are taken care of by systems of agents. When do you think that will really come to be? Is that

• 36:25Craig S. Smith?

  a year out, five years out, 10 years out?

• 36:28Speaker 00

  I think so. A year ago, we were talking about agents as an idea. I think largely all around software. I think it was like a year and three months ago that the word agentic first crossed my vernacular plane.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  And but really, again, the argument, and I think it's sound, is you gotta have a governance platform, right? It's gotta have purity, authentication, authorization, blah, blah, blah, observability, all these things in it. That exists now. We've solved that problem with Boomi's Agent Control Tower. There are a couple of other companies that are building observability things, but ours is completely natively integrated, or AWS is a case in point. So you could build agents with Boomi. You could build agents with AWS Bedrock. You could build agents in ServiceNow. You can observe and manage all of this, and we're going to continue to integrate as Boomi is an integration platform with a whole range of agentic platforms.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  If I can build an agent, we want to be able to constantly publish, watch, and observe with Boomi. So that has happened. So I think it's actually, I think we're going to go from single-digit percentage of business processes that have agents integrated into them to 75% or greater in one year. Because the platform to build agents to govern, observe, it's there now.

• 37:48Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And how does the control, I mean, at a certain point, you're going to need an agent managing the control tower when, you know, you have five million agents.

• 38:01Craig S. Smith?

  You can't have a single dashboard or even a suite of dashboard.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, this is the part where it gets super complex because we do have an AI agent managing the control tower that manages the agents. So it's sitting there thinking, how do I bring you in the looping web? So yes, it's I, I don't know how many agents will need to manage the agents, but we have at least one right now.

• 38:23Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. And who are the biggest, what are you concentrated in anyone in the industry? Am I doing a?

• 38:37Craig S. Smith?

  Okay.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  So we, the 23,000 customers we have today are literally in a good way, all over the place. We don't have a, a specific industry focus, but we have tons of companies by industries with thousands of customers in manufacturing, legal, HR, you know, technologies, retail, CPG, research, insurance, finance, they're all over the place. And that's intentional. So we, we, we aim to be the integration and automation layer for all industries.

• 39:10Craig S. Smith?

  Right. And so you've got Agent Studio, Agent Control Tower. What do you see on the roadmap that people should be watching?

• 39:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. So well, so Agent Studio is the broad term for everything. We have Agent Designer, which is the, the build tool. There's something called Agent Garden, which is our secure container to run agents securely. So we can't get out, do the thing. Then we have Agent Control Tower, and we also have Agent Marketplace. We're literally, we're going to be sharing, you know, at Boomi World, our, our big customer event, that we have hundreds of pre-built AI agents by industry, by the way, with thousands coming. So we have, we have a marketplace as well. So all of those things are there. I, I think what you'll see beyond this is how do we start to develop that agent fabric that I alluded to earlier, where it's more me expressing

• 40:05Speaker 00

  my intent or desired outcome. And then the right agents are just summoned and your problem is solved. And that's what we want to go, where we want to go next.

• 40:15Craig S. Smith?

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• 40:59Craig S. Smith?

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• 41:44Craig S. Smith?

  Eye on AI, all run together, E-Y-E-O-N-A-I. That's oracle.com/eyeonaai.