Thrive or survive? Boomi CEO says era of AI-driven automation has arrived

By Cathy Rose A. Garcia, Editor-in-Chief

DALLAS, Texas — Boomi is positioning itself to take the lead in helping organizations in this era of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven automation.

“I believe that we are living in this era of AI-driven automation, where every single business process that you have can be enhanced, augmented, accelerated, replaced, improved by AI,” Boomi Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Steve Lucas said in his keynote speech at Boomi World here on May 14.

He said the gap is widening between the companies with AI and those without.

“This divide is something I’m not comfortable with — it’s the AI haves and have-nots. I worry about the companies, the countries, that have superior AI. I worry about the small companies, the ones that aren’t spending billions of dollars on AI research, those companies. How will they compete?”

“I believe that we should be here for everyone that isn’t spending billions of dollars on AI, not just to survive in this new era of AI but thrive.”

Mr. Lucas said Boomi is the one platform that can deliver it all in this era of AI-driven automation.

The Boomi enterprise platform now includes AI agent management, which allows for agent building, orchestration and operations, process-aware intelligence, support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and governance.

“We believe this platform is the one that you should bet on for your agentic future,” he said.

Mr. Lucas said there are currently around 33,000 Boomi AI agents in action.

Boomi Chief Product and Technology Officer Ed Macosky said in a briefing that customers have been seeing real benefits from the use of AI agents.

“What I’m seeing with our customers, and others in the market, this tide is turning in terms of people are starting to see real benefits. They’ve moved from pilots, prototypes… to solutions that are really saving money, but that is a lot of where we’re focused now and then chaining them together. That momentum will continue,” Mr. Macosky said.

Some of the customers have reported a 97% reduction in response time, an 80% drop in documentation time, and 50% faster issue resolution.

“This AI is built for scale, but it’s not just that… We are solving real problems,” Mr. Lucas said.

AI agents are being used in a wide range of industries, such as manufacturing, healthcare, financial services and insurance, retail and consumer goods, energy and utilities, transportation and logistics, and hospitality and travel.

NO CODE
Boomi is making its Agentstudio generally available to customers starting May 24. This would allow users to design, build and manage AI agents in a no-code environment.

“We can agentify everything… AI is going to rewrite how we operate. Every aspect of our business will change. In manufacturing, agents will optimize supply chains. This is happening now,” Mr. Lucas said.

“Make a choice. Are we going to survive in this era of AI-driven automation or are we going to thrive? and I believe the choice is simple we need to thrive.”

Mr. Lucas said that a year ago, building an AI agent was “kind of like wizardry,” but now one can just use Boomi to create an agent.

“When I create the agent, I can go into a Boomi process and then I can drop it in, and it participates in the process itself. No code. That is the most important part of this. We are commoditizing agent creation,” he said.

Boomi also partnered with Amazon Web Services to develop an agentic governance platform called Agent Control Tower.

“Whether you have two agents or 200,000 in your company or two million, we can watch the agents, we can understand what they do, we can report on their behavior,” Mr. Lucas said.

Boomi expects customers to transform their business processes using AI agents on the Boomi platform and building millions of AI agents.

“This is the platform for automation in the era of AI. So, the real question, though, is how do I go fast? … Change only happens at the speed of trust,” Mr. Lucas said.

In a separate briefing on May 14, Mr. Lucas said he believes agentic processes will be the dominant form of automation going forward.

“I think it’s real. I think it needs to be practical. I think what doesn’t help is the (OpenAi CEO) Sam Altman prognostication that everyone’s going to lose their jobs, we’re going to have artificial superintelligence in three years, and we’re all screwed. That is not helpful commentary,” he said.

Mr. Lucas said the company remains guided by its “north star” to “take complex things and make them simple.”

“The reality is that every company on this planet has this question before them: Will I be an AI-driven company or not?… We want to be the great equalizer for that company, the platform that levels the playing field,” he said.

“You can do more than just survive. You can thrive in this world.”