#294 Bhaskar Roy: How Workato Is Building the Rise of the Agentic Enterprise

Try OCI for free at http://oracle.com/eyeonai 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. How are enterprises moving from AI experiments to a true agentic enterprise with measurable ROI? In this episode of Eye on AI, host Craig Smith speaks with Bhaskar Roy from Workato about how organizations can design, orchestrate, and govern AI agents at scale without sacrificing security or control. Together they unpack Workato's approach to building a single workspace for employees while agents and apps work behind the scenes to automate real business processes. They explain why the future of enterprise AI depends on orchestration, permissions, and human in the loop design. You will hear how Workato One and Workato Go bring connectivity, action, and governance into one stack, how teams assign KPIs to agents and track outcomes, and how to reduce agent sprawl while optimizing SaaS spend. Learn how leading companies are defining the agentic enterprise, what pitfalls to avoid when moving from pilots to production, and how to measure impact across sales, IT, support, HR, and finance so AI drives durable business value. 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

  Agents are coming in everywhere now. It is not just now civil sharing between apps. It's also civil sharing between all of these agents. Even finding a document, you're going through various places. You know, if you want to take certain actions through an agent, you have to figure out which agent should I talk to? Where is this agent? How do I talk to that agent in order to get things done? Our vision of an agentic enterprise is that of one super application. Your apps are connected to it, your agents are connected to it. It is bringing in information, it is understanding what is happening in your world. It's learning through that, bringing you all the core things that you need to work on that day. And then there are agents behind the scenes powering that work and doing that work for you.

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• 2:07Speaker 01

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

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Thanks, thanks, Craig. Firstly, thanks for having me on this podcast. Truly appreciate it. You know, I'm Bhaskar Roy. I had all been inside AI products and solutions here at Varkato. I, my career, I started as a software developer way back when. And you know, this is, I'll age myself by saying this, I was at a company called Tandem Computers, which built non-stop software and I was a part of the operating system team, building out these kind of capabilities therein. And, and from there, you know, as I started interacting with more and more customers, I loved that customer interaction and then became a product manager, went into product marketing, et cetera.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Now, the way, you know, I came to Varkato was actually, there is a story there. So I, I was a, I started a company called Quick, Q Y K. We were in mobile video streaming space and then got acquired by Skype and then Microsoft. And during that period of time, you know, I met Vijay Thala, who's the CEO of Varkato. And, and a bunch of folks, when we built that team and, and we went through that particular journey. Once Quick was acquired by Skype, Vijay went in, in a different direction, looked at something and then started Varkato. And I did another startup in the meantime called Playphone.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  But you know, it was pretty much inevitable that, you know, once something happens with Playphone, I'll come back to this particular team because. It's a team I enjoy working with, right? I've worked with them, you know, in the past. So, once Playphone got acquired, you know, I came in and joined Warkato. And the mission for Warkato was what, apart from the people, the mission of Warkato was just the thing that that just inspired me. Because the entire premise was, you know, how can you go about integrating your applications and orchestrating across the board in a low-code, no-code manner? What I mean by that is, during that period of time, SaaS was growing like crazy. The business team were buying these SaaS applications.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  But then, how do you really integrate? How do you really bring that together? It was still a very IT-oriented work, right? So, they could not scale to handle all the various things that were being thrown at them by the business. So, Warkato was born to figure out, how can we enable not just the IT team to be more productive doing this, but also the operations team in various lines of businesses being able to build their own, you know, integrations, orchestrations, et cetera, and do it in a secure and governed manner? And this opened up the entire aperture as to who all can do things, what can be done? And and that was exciting, as to how do you go about democratizing this?

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Since then, obviously, Warkato has moved on to the agentic side of things or added, I would say not moved on, added agentic capabilities with that same ethos in mind. As to how can we enable people to build various purpose-specific agents that are the code of their business processes and be able to do this in a low-code, no-code manner with all the things that they need in order to deploy agents at court?

• 5:40Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and this is an enterprise software.

• 5:46Craig S. Smith?

  Excuse me.

• 5:50Craig S. Smith?

  And, um, sorry, I'll cut all that out.

• 5:56Craig S. Smith?

  What is, I mean, when you say widen the aperture, you're you're talking about taking it out of the IT department and making it available to people in the business units? And what specifically was the original?

• 6:16Craig S. Smith?

  And what specifically was the original Workato for? And then we'll talk about Workato Go.

• 6:26Craig S. Smith?

  Is that the agent building platform?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it was, I won't say that it was taken out of the IT department. IT is still the primary user and of this, right? It's how do you make them more productive is one part of it. And even when you do that democratization or enable other people to build, IT is still providing the security, the governance capabilities. So that, you know, the, the business teams that are also building these automations can, can do it in a, in a safe and secure manner, right? And something that I think can manage in, in production. So there are two aspects of this. It is democratization, but still with security and governance as the capability there is. So that was the core, core part of this.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  Now, what we announced recently, Craig, are two things. One is Workato one as, as one single platform, and I can get into it in, in more details. And Workato Go as that end user experience where every employee in, in a company can become very productive and have just one application to do everything that they need to do in order to get their work done. So those are the two core components that we announced recently.

• 7:44Craig S. Smith?

  I see. And Workato, I mean, I always say this when I'm a little bit at sea. If you were to meet somebody at a cocktail party and they know nothing about software, without slipping into jargon, how would you describe to them what Workato does?

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so think of Workato as the platform that you use in order to, you know, essentially pull together every aspects of your business and deliver to that. What I mean by that is today, your business is run by your business processes. And these processes can be cross-functional or core to what you deliver. How can you really have agents in currently as a way for you to orchestrate all of these agents? And do that in a secure manner? And something apart from security, something that scales as your business scales, right? So you don't have to think about all of those core technical capabilities for you to have

• 8:51Speaker 00

  agents drive operational efficiencies, being able to reduce the risks, you know, overall, and you see ROI from that.

• 8:59Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and it's a platform.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  It is a platform, exactly.

• 9:04Craig S. Smith?

  With different functionalities. And I'm assuming that you ingest data from various places in the enterprise? And then makes that data available for for different purposes, including agentic workflows. Is that close to what it is?

• 9:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is close. And I can dive a little bit deeper into that, Craig, if you'd like. That I've, I would say, you know, there are five key aspects of this. And this also comes together when you're building agents that drive your core, core business processes. So one is deep connectivity to your applications, data sources, knowledge bases, like you were talking about. Now, these can be in cloud or on-prem, doesn't really matter, wherever your data is. Now, there is an element which is the reason why I call deep connectivity. Is it is not just connecting to your applications, right?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Whenever you're connecting or trying to move data from one to the other, trying to orchestrate a workflow, you know, there are exceptions that happen, right? The end system is down, right? Part of the data got moved, not the entire thing. So there are all of these exceptions that happen. And the deep connectivity layer that we have takes care of all of that. So that the end user who's building the automation or is building the agent doesn't have to worry about it. So that's item number one. The second is what we call deep action. What that means is when you're going to orchestrate workflows and even agentic workflows, you want that entire orchestration to happen end to end.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  Sometimes it is connecting multiple systems, sometimes it's moving data, sometimes it is being able to understand what that logic is, reasoning, inferring, all of that stuff, so that the agents do a great job end to end. So that's the second part, which is deep action. The third is agent orchestration and app orchestration. There are multiple apps that you have, there'll be multiple agents that you have. How do you orchestrate all of them together in order to drive that business outcome? That's the third element of this. The, the fourth, uh, you know, is, as you can imagine, is security and governance. Because all of these things that you're done, that you're doing, has to have firstly a zero trust architecture, but also if you look at it, when it's going to execute a particular

• 11:33Speaker 00

  process, I may have different permission than someone else. How does it take that into consideration when it's orchestrating those processes end to end? And then one final, the fifth item, which is in the platform capabilities, there is one single runtime. So you don't have to worry about DevOps. It scales up and down based on demand. It scales as you, as the company scales. It scales throughout as you're building more and more agents or, or, you know, workflow automations throughout your company, all of those things come together. So these are the five, I would say, core components that make up that work out of platform.

• 12:10Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, um, can, I mean, you, you talk about the, uh, the agentic enterprise. Uh, can you paint a picture for us? What, what does the life, a day in the life of a knowledge worker look like in a company that has fully embraced this, the, the agentic enterprise concept?

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Currently, if you look at, you know, most of the folks, their day to day is swivel chairing across multiple applications. Sometimes I'm looking at a CRM, sometimes a ticketing system, sometimes I'm going into HR because I need to file a PTO. There are all of those various things and, and, uh, and the knowledge worker today is going from app to app to app to get things done. And in future, as agents coming, or not in future, agents are coming in everywhere now, as you can, as you can see. It was not just now civil sharing between apps, it's also civil sharing between all of these agents. Even finding a document, you're going through various places, you know, if you want to take certain actions through an agent,

• 13:17Speaker 00

  you have to figure out which agent should I talk to, where is this agent, how do I talk to that agent in order to get things done? Our vision of an agentic enterprise is that of one super application, which we call Varkado Go. Your apps are connected to it, your agents are connected to it. It is bringing in information, it is understanding what is happening in your world, it's learning through that. Bringing you all the core things that you need to work on that day. And then there are agents behind the scenes powering that work and doing that work for you. So for a knowledge worker, they're spending all the time in this one application in order to get all their jobs done. They're able to search for stuff, they're able to take action, they're able to orchestrate workflows.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  They even get the insights that, hey, so for example, if I want to get a, a simple thing as laptop, where is it in that particular process? Or if I'm hiring a candidate, where is that agent who is acting on it? Is in that process, what does that look like? And it's bringing, surfacing those kind of information to me to, and to basically do my job a lot more efficiently and more, and me being more productive.

• 14:28Craig S. Smith?

  And so this agentic enterprise, you know, people are talking about this, they're talking about a, a headless organization. You know, you, you, you have an agent that, that handles

• 14:46Craig S. Smith?

  maybe sales calls or, or, or sorts, uh, sales leads and.

• 14:53Craig S. Smith?

  And maybe does an initial outreach by email and schedules a call to those that respond favorably. And then you have an agent that that prepares the salesperson by doing research on the company and, you know, giving him that in a digestible form. And then after the call, maybe you you have an agent that's, I don't know what that's that's taking the call notes and and putting to do items onto a calendar.

• 15:31Craig S. Smith?

  All of this stuff, the the knowledge worker, he has a web interface with Workato, I'm guessing, and and can see all of these different agents and what can click on them and see where they are in the process or whether they're waiting for the human to to answer something. Is is that, am I describing what it's doing?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, Craig, that is exactly, you know, it's very close to what you're talking about. The other element of this is it's not just the agents. Agents do most of this autonomously, right? But it's also able to guide those agents, saying that, okay, you know, I I need, I need, I'm, help me prepare a call, but these are some of the things that I'm looking for. So those kind of ability for for us humans to actually guide these agents so that they do a better job. That's a part of it. And then the agents, as a part of, as they're working through that, they're learning through the guidance that they're getting. Also, for each of these agents, you specify, you know, what is the end goal? What is the KPI?

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Like you were talking about, you know, the goal is maybe to book a meeting with that particular customer in the initial stage. And so when you specify that goal, the agent works with you to figure out how to go about it. And then it goes autonomously, starting doing things. And you're able to see where things are as a result of that. Similarly, after the meeting is booked, like you were saying, a call happened, a transcript comes out. But it's not just the standard transcript. Every company has their own selling methodology, right? And it's able to adapt that transcript into that selling methodology, automatically updating, say, your CRM like Salesforce and others so that there is very clear visibility or a hygiene of that particular application that comes in.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  And then when it has to send a sequence, whether it be email or a follow-up calls, et cetera, it prompts a human or the sales rep in this case saying, hey, this is what I'm looking to do. Are you good with it? Enable them to edit, make changes, and then it goes ahead and takes the next steps, et cetera. So there is this element of agents and people come together in order to do that work. And through each of these interactions, agents are learning and understanding more and it's getting better day by day in order to assist this particular person.

• 18:00Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And so you were talking about permissions. So if I'm a salesman in an organization, I would have my work work out a desktop or configured to

• 18:16Craig S. Smith?

  to my domain and my activities. Then would my supervisor, maybe the head of the sales department,

• 18:26Craig S. Smith?

  be able to look across all agents working for all the people in the department? Or, I mean, are there are there level layers or levels? And then you get up to the CEO and he can look at where Koro go and and understand, you know, how far along they are in the sales department to meeting their quarterly target, maybe, or how, you know, what what inventory looks like if it's a material goods company. And I mean, is it that sort of permissioning and so that each person and each level of the organization has a different view?

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Yes, there are multiple levels of permissioning, right? Based on the role that you have, it understands that and and caters to that role. So at the complete granular level, say, for example, if I'm a sales rep, I have access to certain accounts and opportunities. It understands that. And when I ask to make an update or do some changes, it takes my permission to make those updates, right? So we call that agent authentication. So what that means is there is very clear that I can update only the things that I own or have access to and not something else that I don't have access to. So it starts from there and then then it goes up, right? The sales manager is able to see a view of all the sales rapport to them. What does that look like?

• 19:58Speaker 00

  And then as it goes up to the CEO, they see that as well all the way it travels through. So it it respects the the role and the permissions that the user has and understands the levels in order to surface the information accordingly.

• 20:11Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And are the agents um that that are working uh within the Workato ecosystem, are those built by Workato? Or or because increasingly there are these agentic marketplaces where you can go find an agent that does something you you want to do rather than building it yourself. Does or or is Workato, do you have to build the agents within Workato?

• 20:42Speaker 00

  That's a great question, Craig. There are two aspects of this. One is um one is we have an agent studio that you can use in order to build custom agents that you want, right? So that's one aspect of it. The second is we prepackage agents. We call them agent X applications that people can take pretty much right off the shelf, customize it to their specific processes and get going with those. And there is a third element of this, this is what the agent orchestration is, which is if you build agents on some other platform, right, or some other capabilities, our agents are able to interact with those agents in order to perform whatever the function they're looking to do.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  So there are these three aspects that enable a company to build agents using Verccaro specifically, take one of our, you know, pre-built agents, or have our agents be interacting with other agents that are built in other platforms in order to get the job done.

• 21:45Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and you know, there's, I'm not sure it's really happened yet, but people are concerned about agent sprawl, where an organization ends up with, you know, hundreds or thousands of agents. And, you know, no one is really sure how many they are, what they're doing, which is sort of a frightening thing. How do you manage agent sprawl with Verccaro?

• 22:17Speaker 00

  Oh, I think, you know, I'll go back a bit and then talk about agent sprawl. With Verccaro, for the past decade or so, we were helping with app sprawl. There were so many SaaS applications which are there and we were able to connect and, you know, make, get meaning out of it so that you can orchestrate workflows end to end. We see the problem very similarly. Agent sprawl, I think, is going to be much more than the app sprawl.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  And, and you know, being able to orchestrate across those agents is a core thing that we build in. And as a part of that, security and governance, who has access to what agents? What agents can do is a core part and we provide that capability when to, in order to orchestrate across all of these agents. And the final answer is, you know, it's, it's one part of it is agent sprawl and being able to orchestrate everything around it. But at the end of the day, if you think about from an end user and employee standpoint, they need one place to go. They don't care if it is agent A, B, C, D, what is getting that work done. They just need one place to go in order to get things done. And that is where Caro go.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  That one single interface where you go, where you search for things, where you're finding answers for things. And agents, whether it's built on Caro or other agentic platforms are all a part of it in order to get that thing done. So the end user experience is also, I think, key in order to drive this adoption.

• 23:47Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, that's interesting what you said about SaaS sprawl. Because even as an individual, you know, you you see an interesting piece of software. You sign up for the trial. That is going to turn into a subscription. You tell yourself, well, I'll cancel that before it starts. You try it out and then you forget about it. And two years later, you suddenly realize, oh, my God, I've been paying X number of dollars a month for this thing that I forgot even signed up for. And I'm sure in large organizations that happens a lot. So with Caro.

• 24:30Craig S. Smith?

  Is there a function where you can track all SaaS and agents, agentic applications in the enterprise and see which ones are not being used and then, you know,

• 24:52Craig S. Smith?

  disable them or or get rid of them if if if they've just been forgotten about. I mean, how how is there a level at which maybe an IT manager,

• 25:08Craig S. Smith?

  CTO, or somebody can can see how efficiently the agents are being used and whether they're agents that people have created and then left idle that that should be disconnected from the from the enterprise.

• 25:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is a, Vince, you can do that with Varkaro. We, we call it license optimization. Essentially, because one, one part of it is an application. But typically, when you buy an application, you would buy a number of seats, right? In the sense, a number of users who can use that. So, and, and when, being able to optimize those licenses based on usage, predominantly based on usage, right? Things like that. There are capabilities in Varkaro that enable you to detect that and optimize your licenses across the board. Because we see, especially in, in IT, we're having to deal with so many different apps and down the road, so many different, uh, you know, agents as well. That is a key part as to how do you consolidate that?

• 26:11Speaker 00

  How do you make sure that the, that you know, you're getting subscriptions for and other things, for things that people use and on a regular basis? Yeah, there are certain applications which don't, which are not regularly used based, but that's okay. But being able to optimize licenses across your entire tech stack is, is a capability that Varkaro, uh, provides.

• 26:34Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And what's the range of, of agents? I mean, uh, not that agents is the only thing that you guys do, but what is the range of agents that, that you see, uh, in, uh, in, you know, companies using or, or building with Varkaro or that Varkaro has available in its, uh, prepackaged agents? Like from what to what? Uh, you know, uh, people hear the word agents and they generally think of a very narrow, uh, scope or, uh, you know, group of, uh, activities.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we means in our customer base, we are seeing, you know, a number of different use cases, Craig, but if I look at what are the top four or five, one is the sales part that you talked about. We, we call our agents genies. And, and the reason why it is a genie is typically like you were talking about, agents still are at the periphery of what you can do. They are not at the core of your business processes. Where genies have this capability so that when you build these genies, you give them a KPI as to how, what is the goal that they need to achieve? Then you provide it with specific skills as to these are the skills that you can execute.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  So you're enabling that agent to do or this genie to do more. And then you provide it with knowledge bases. And also, you know, what are the various events that it should listen to so that it can run autonomously? So that makes a genie, right? So we are seeing these genies, you know, in a number of cases. One is an IT help desk. People coming in, asking questions, saying that, hey, my laptop is broken. I need access to X, Y, Z software. And the agents behind the scene that help you do that. That's one. Very similarly, customer support, right? In the sense when customers are coming to your support site, looking for things, they're interacting with an agent and this agent is able to, you know,

• 28:44Speaker 00

  take actions on behalf of this, like you were talking about inventory. I ordered something. Hey, where is my order? When will I get it, right? Where is it in that process? All of those things, the actions that agents can take, it is able to do that. So customer support is the second use case that we see. So sales, IT, customer support. The final thing that we are seeing quite a bit is around HR and finance, right? In HR, It's because people have to do their job on a regular basis, things like expense reporting, you know, a PTO that I want to file. When should I enroll for benefits? What are the various things that, you know, do you on a regular basis on an HR standpoint? That's the other thing we are seeing.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  And in finance, it ranges across the board, like procure to pay is a pretty big use case that we see. So there are all accrual, that's another use case that we see. So there are all of these various things that we are seeing our customers do. But predominantly, I would say that those are the core functions or lines of businesses where we see where our customers are using Workato agents for.

• 29:53Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, okay. And Workato Go, we started talking about that, is the all in one application for employees. Can you tell us about Workato One, which was also recently launched? And within Workato One, as I understand, there's an orchestration. I don't know if it's a level or a module or a component. And then there's Workato Agentic, which introduces the ability to build and manage agents.

• 30:36Craig S. Smith?

  And can you sort of explain that and differentiate those and how they relate to Workato Go?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So think of Workato One as the platform. You know, we talk about the five key things that are needed in a platform for you to benefit from agents, right? Or bring agents to the core of your business. So Workato is that one platform which brings all of these things together, right? So when you're building agents, say for example, when a sales ops person is building an agent. They don't have to think of all the intricacies of the platform. How do I run it? How do I deploy it? How secure is it? All of those things that come as a part of it. They don't have to think about that because the platform takes care of everything that is needed in order to really run and deploy those agents at scale.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  So that is the Varkato one platform. Now, within that platform, there is this Varkato Go, which is the end employee experience. So me, employee, go to, means go to Varkato Go, hence the name Go, in order to get my work done. That's the web application that I'm interacting with. That's the mobile application that I'm interacting with to say, hey, I'm looking for this document, or I want to now start a quoting process that are agents behind the scene that is helping you do that work. So that's what think of Varkato one as that one product, one platform with one end user, you know, capability for you to, for you to put all of these things together and use this in your enterprise.

• 32:13Craig S. Smith?

  I see. And, and within that, there's a, a feature, a function that orchestrates data and applications and processes.

• 32:29Craig S. Smith?

  Is that right? And then there's an agentic layer or module that builds and manages agents. And all of that then is delivered to the end user on Varkato Go, depending on their permissions.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:51Craig S. Smith?

  Am I getting that right?

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, you are. So the core of the Varkato, you know, one platform, there is an orchestration capability. We believe that the core thing that differentiates an agent is for it to be able to take action and orchestrate processes end to end, right? You give it a KPI, it understands these are the things that I need to orchestrate and it does that. So a core part of this is what we call Varkato orchestrate. It enables that entire orchestration. It enables you to connect to all of those applications which are there. So that's the key part. Now, on top of this Varkato orchestrate capability, which comes as a part of Varkato one. Is this agentic capability that enables you to build these purpose specific agents that

• 33:37Speaker 00

  that can orchestrate processes that can, you know, execute actions throughout, throughout, you know, uh, end to end. So that's that agentic capability. And these agentic capability also enables you to interact with agents that you build from, uh, you know, which are built not using Workato, but from third party as well. So if you think of Workato one, it has full orchestration capabilities for agents to leverage. It also has the security and governance and connectivity layer. And on top of it is an agentic layer that enables you to build these agents which are at the core of your business processes.

• 34:15Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Uh, and, and you know, the, there's, I mean, this, this, uh, is interesting and, uh, but there are, is an explosion of, of, uh, agents or agentic platforms and orchestration platforms and specialized agents. How does Workato differentiate itself, uh, in, in that explosion of, of new platforms?

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great question. So you know, most of the agentic platforms or agentic frameworks, which are there for you to build agents, do one part of the job, which is for you to build agents and build it in code. And then you have to put the, all the other pieces together, whether it be security and governance, connectivity to all your applications for it to really work well. You have to figure out, you know, how do you really deploy these agents, how you can scale those agents. All of those pieces are not there in agentic platform. And Workato was born to do that, right? In the sense, our initial thesis, if you look at it, was around to do that orchestration across applications. Now we are taking it

• 35:31Speaker 00

  to, uh, on the agent side as well. So that end to end capability that we provide is not something that other agentic platforms are able to provide. And and that's the core differentiation that we bring in as to how do you really deploy agents at scale and at the core of your business processes? You know, it kind of reminds me recently, I I saw a Gartner um report and there was this chart which was called the agency gap. And what they found is most of the businesses are at the low agency side of things. They're doing simple tasks in simple systems. They're not proactive.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  They're not, they don't have as much of a learning capability in order to do that. So those are at the edges, like create email, create some content, things like that are being done. Whereas on the core businesses processes side of things, those are still, a lot of it is still being done by humans and others. Because the agents have not been able to do that at the core of business processes. And our thesis is mainly to reduce that gap. Because most of our customers are using it to drive their core business processes throughout and become more efficient as a result of that. So that's the, that's what, you know, we address with Varkaro one and the differentiation that we bring.

• 36:57Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, um, the, um, yeah, business leaders, I've, I feel for them because, uh,

• 37:07Craig S. Smith?

  you know, they're, they, they feel that they have to do something. They're under pressure from the board. Are we adopting agents? Are we adopting AI? Uh, and it's just a sea of, of products and platforms. And then consultants who are trying to guide them around.

• 37:31Craig S. Smith?

  What, how are our, our business leaders or how should they be choosing? Uh, a platform or choosing a starting point for AI? To, to solve real business problems and not just, as you said, uh, you know, having employees read their emails with an agent.

• 37:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  You know, when we talk to customers, it's, it's means we guide them in, in a few different direction. One is thinking a little bit long term. Yes, there are things that can improve productivity, like you were talking about, whether it be emails, et cetera. Those are, those are great. But think long term as to how your businesses can be more efficient. How can you drive the core KPIs of your business? How can you drive more revenue? How can you, you know, operate more efficiently, et cetera? Look at those aspects of it and try to come up with, and we guide them to come up with a core use case that they use an agent to do. Because at the end of the day, when you look at those core use cases,

• 38:43Speaker 00

  that's where you see ROI, right? In the sense, productivity gains will happen, but from a business ROI standpoint, if you look at that, the core thing is, is it really at the core of my business process, helping me with my core things like, say, order to cash, employee onboarding, offboarding, supply chain, you know, improvements? Are those things being done through an agent? That is what we guide our customers through, to look at how they can really benefit from this and get the ROI from the investment that they'll be making on the, on the Agentic side.

• 39:17Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, that's interesting because there initially, when agents came out, or even generative AI, before it was Agentic, there was a lot of talk about productivity and time savings. But as people have adopted things, I think they're realizing a lot of this low level stuff, like an employee being able to read it, his emails faster, or something

• 39:55Craig S. Smith?

  like that, or write an email faster. Time is saved, but it's very fragmented. It doesn't necessarily add up to.

• 40:06Craig S. Smith?

  Cross enterprise savings, it saves the employees some time. So, you know, maybe you can take a longer lunch break or, you know, it doesn't necessarily equate to productivity for the enterprise. And what you're talking about with ROI as opposed to these, these more fragmented savings is looking at how the agents are improving ROI

• 40:38Craig S. Smith?

  as, as the agents are adopted. And how do you measure that?

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, um, that is means the ROI depends a lot on the use case. So for example, for a customer support or IT, a, a big part of it is if you think about the KPIs, how many tickets or customer queries are getting deflected and addressed by agents? That's the KPI. If you look at on the sales side, the KPIs are different, which is could be how many new opportunities are we generating, which is done by agents? And how quickly an opportunity moves from, you know, various stages, stage one to being a closed one, basically closing that opportunity? How quickly are agents able to assist with that? So the KPIs are different.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  And so we have this capability where you can define these KPIs and there are dashboards that you can see how effective that particular agent is in, in order to deliver to the KPI that you have defined for that particular agent.

• 41:40Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, that's interesting. So, so from the CEO's point of view, uh, does he have a, a global view and, you know, do all of these, uh, ROI gains add up to an enterprise-wide ROI that he can track?

• 42:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, Vince, that's possible. Absolutely. Where they can, Vince, depending upon the KPI that the CEO is monitoring, they can look at all those ROI's or these dashboards for agents to come that, to bring that together.

• 42:16Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. What, how, how do you guide companies when they come to you? Well, I guess, first of all, is this for Fortune 200? Is it for Fortune 5000? I mean, what level of enterprise are you targeting?

• 42:37Speaker 00

  It is, I would say, more Fortune 5000 side of things.

• 42:41Craig S. Smith?

  Right. So it's, it's, it's, it's a broad market.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  It's a broad market. Yes.

• 42:47Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and you have the advantage of having been doing this for a long time with SaaS applications. So when, when people, well, also, how do you price this? Is it by seat? Is it by usage across an enterprise or?

• 43:11Speaker 00

  It is, it is predominantly by, by, I would say, what we, it's by consumption of that, right? So that's, that's the predominantly way that we price this.

• 43:24Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  And I think it works well. Sorry to interrupt the, and it works well because as you're consuming, as you're using this, it goes back to our initial usage talk, right? Which is as you're using this, you're seeing more and more benefit from it. And that's, that's the way we price it. So that, you know, if you're not using it, you know, there is really no benefit that you're seeing from it, right? So usage-based pricing is the way we price.

• 43:52Craig S. Smith?

  And in the Workato as a platform, as agentic capabilities progress and they're progressing quickly, you can plug, you can replace agents. You're not married to one particular agent or one particular SaaS product in the, in the Workato platform. Is that right? They, it's sort of, you plug these different things in.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  That's, that's right. You can plug in different kinds of agents, different kinds of applications, et cetera, and it's able to orchestrate through all of that.

• 44:29Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah. And, and you said it's scalable. How, how big can it get?

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Ah, gosh. So far, we have not run into a limit. I'll give an example. One of the customers we are, we are starting to work with, they process around 80,000 customer requests per day.

• 44:52Craig S. Smith?

  Wow.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  And, and we are good with that, right? So basically, the architecture is built in a way where it can scale up and down based on the customer demand. And, you know, it, it is, it is architected in a way that, you know, the zero trust is baked into it. So, and, and the great thing with this, Craig, is the customers don't have to do anything in it. It is just the platform level. We go up and down based on how, means what, what are the number of things that, you know, we are seeing across the board. It's not that the customer all of a sudden have to think, oh, I need to do now 80,000, 100,000 of these requests. Address that. I need to buy separate servers. I need to, you know, have different cores or various other things.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  You just don't think about it. You know, it, it just goes up and down based on what that usage is looking like.

• 45:44Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, you know, uh, do you think that companies are going to come up working with a platform like Workato experimenting that they'll come up with innovations or even breakthroughs in in how their business operates, or maybe their industry operates. Uh, now that they have these tools and I'm thinking I have a friend who's a software developer and a good one. And he was saying how wonderful Claude code is, you know, the the coding, uh,

• 46:26Craig S. Smith?

  I guess coding agent that Claude has. Uh, and that suddenly he feels really powerful because he can do so much more in so much less time than he could previously. So, uh, do you have a sense uh, that companies are going to start doing things that no one thought of or and it's really going to change the the business landscape?

• 46:53Speaker 00

  I totally think so. I think this is such a transformative technology. And it's broad based, right? In the sense, it is something that every company can benefit from. Uh, this agentic technology, or even if you go back to generative AI, it will completely transform companies. Because they can scale a lot more efficiently, they can grow various different things. I think innovation will be huge across the board in companies, mainly because just like you're talking about a software developer being more productive with Claude code, cursor and other tools. Businesses will become a lot more productive.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  You know, I was talking about this customer who's looking at eighty thousand, you know, requests per day that they get from customers. They are taking a completely different look as to what that customer experience would look like. And this is an e-commerce company. How they can better serve their customers through these agents who are there 24/7, being able to help them through various things. You know, it's it's it's game changing for them, right? How they have process returns, all of that stuff that we all love for from Amazon, because it has put the resources now all e-commerce companies are able to do things like that and provide that better experience overall. So I think it just changes every company in the way they do things.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  And you know, interestingly, we are seeing companies already in that mindset. They are looking at it from that this can transform. And as a result, you know, the boards are also pushing them accordingly, because this is the transformative technology that that will just change the way you we operate overall.

• 48:37Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, and it seems to me, well, this is a question. How affordable is the pricing for a small enterprise or a startup? Or is it really heavier lift than that?

• 48:51Speaker 00

  No, it is. I mean, since we are predominantly, like I was talking about, usage based, the lift is not that heavy in terms of getting started with it.

• 49:00Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, well, what I was gonna say is that it it it opens the door for for startups in a lot of industries who could be a native agentic or agentic natives. You know, the way that people wanted to be digital natives one time. And, you know, for the for it's also sort of frightening for established companies, because if they don't adopt and adopt this agentic enterprise mindset, they could quickly find themselves, you know, falling behind or obsolete even.

• 49:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you're right. I think the way, at least we talk about it as the agentic enterprise is something that almost every company needs to go to so that they don't fall behind. That's one part of it. The other element is if you even look at the employees or the people or the workforce, the knowledge workers, there will be these folks who are more productive by being able to leverage agents compared to folks who don't. Right? So that also will come together. So if in an agentic enterprise, businesses are becoming more efficient and driving this being competitive innovation at scale. And the employees are leveraging these agents to be more productive on a day to day basis.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  So it's like, almost like you can see this growing exponentially if all of these things come together.

• 50:37Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, you have kind of a front row seat to this stuff. Do you have a sense of where this is going? As I said, the capabilities, agentic capabilities are increasing weekly, it seems. In five years, are we going to have, as I referenced at the beginning, headless organizations that are basically a lot of agents and a lot of managers sort of

• 51:13Craig S. Smith?

  coordinating the agents or, you know, a layer of employees managing the agents, but then

• 51:22Craig S. Smith?

  you know, there's, what's the role of the CEO at that point?

• 51:31Speaker 00

  You know how I wish I had a crystal ball to predict what would happen. The way things are moving, they're moving so fast that it is hard to predict, you know, to, at least for me, to predict what it would look like five years. But I think what you're talking about, a headless organization or what we call an agentic enterprise, pretty much every company will be that. They are, everyone is, will be working with agents. Everyone will be looking at how they're driving entire business productivity therein.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  And I, and I think it's all for good. In fact, I was discussing this with one of the coworker. Like we are here today, you know, talking about things. If you think, you know, with agentic and, and the great thing that can be done now with, with generative AI, it can almost look like, you know, we are talking to each other in person rather than on Zoom.

• 52:29Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Maybe out setting in couches in this virtual world, chat, chit chatting about this, right? I, I see that the entire, it means the way we do things will completely change. And I think it'll change for the better, including the interactions that people have with the others. So it is, it is not just on the agent's side. I think overall, you know, we just do better as businesses and as people.

• 52:54Craig S. Smith?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and obviously as a, as a company, you're, you're interested in, in, you know, large enterprises with huge employee workforces. But it, it's exciting. I have, you know, young boys and in their twenties up to thirty. And, and I, I keep talking to them about this stuff because some twenty-five-year-old, some smart kid is gonna get a hold of this stuff and build a global organization with him as friends that, you know, blows the competition out of the water

• 53:36Craig S. Smith?

  because it's purely agentic and they, you know, they're, they're not afraid and they don't have the, the legacy processes to, to, to slow them down. Is, is there anything I've missed in talking about Workato that you want the audience to hear?

• 53:56Speaker 00

  Just thinking.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Well, I think we covered, we covered Workato one, we covered Workato go, we talked about agents, how they are different. I think we covered pretty much everything, Craig.

• 54:12Craig S. Smith?

  Right. And, and again, looking forward, how long do you think, I mean, you can see the, the penetration of agents into the enterprise. And as you said, it's, it's at this point really on the edge. Do you think this is gonna happen quickly? I mean, with things like Workato, I see that it could. Do you think that in five years, most enterprises will be, have adopted large amounts of agents?

• 54:45Speaker 00

  I, I, I think so, Craig. I think the companies, at least the customers that I talked to are already thinking about it. They are thinking as to how they can use this technology to transform their business. And they're there, right? The matter is, it's, it's more about how do they get started, where they get started, and make those kind of long-term bets so that they can grow with, with that company and the platform as they go on that particular journey. So I think it's, it's there, Craig. I won't be surprised if it happens even faster than five years. With the way things are moving and the way companies are, are looking at this, this may happen faster.

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