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

DALLAS, Texas — Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way businesses operate around the world, but Boomi Chief Executive Officer Steve Lucas says real digital transformation must be human-centric to be truly successful.

At last month’s Boomi World, Mr. Lucas said it is important to make sure that people are still at the center of AI-driven transformation.

“I believe it would be the most profound and productive decade in the next 10 years. I believe humans truly will live longer, healthier lives thanks to AI. All of us will benefit from that. But we have to stop and contemplate what societal, what business impacts AI will have,” he said.

In his best-selling book “Digital Impact: The Human Element of AI-driven Transformation,” Mr. Lucas said it would be a mistake to focus on AI without considering how it affects people.

“AI and automation are powerful but their success hinges on one thing: The people who use them. Without a human-centric approach, even the most advanced technology will fail,” he added.

A self-described AI optimist, Mr. Lucas said AI will unlock more opportunities for businesses and the world.

However, he warned that those who lack a strategy for taking advantage of the technology will not be able to compete.

“For every one Blockbuster Video, that one cautionary tale, there will be 100,000 Blockbusters thanks to AI… I know that that may not be the most popular opinion, but it’s true. AI will create such incredibly productive environments that organizations that are relying on humans alone or deterministic process alone, you won’t be able to compete… We’re not talking 10 years from now, we’re talking five,” he said.

Integration and automation are essential for businesses to get the most out of AI, he added.

HUGE OPPORTUNITY
Executives at Boomi, a leading integration and automation company, said they want to make AI more practical for businesses.

Matt McLarty, chief technology officer (CTO) at Boomi, said AI will help augment human capabilities, not replace humans.

“I’m definitely in the camp of yes, AI is a huge, huge opportunity but it’s here to help us, not replace us,” he told BusinessWorld in an interview.

The Boomi platform can be a good entryway for companies that are hesitant to adopt AI, he said, noting it provides a practical and intuitive way to experiment with AI without requiring a significant investment.

“This whole velocity of innovation around AI is so crazy. Trying to keep pace with it is challenging. At the same time, our customers and organizations are still back here saying, wait for us, what do we do,” Mr. McLarty said.

Markus Mueller, global field CTO for application programming interface (API) management at Boomi, said the company is taking the lead in making sure that enterprises make use of AI through the platform.

“Where we lead is practical AI — bringing AI into the enterprise and making it usable — because a lot of the other companies that you find in the AI space, they do great stuff, they do great research, but they don’t excel in making it usable in the companies today,” he told BusinessWorld.

At Boomi World, the company unveiled new product innovations such as the general availability of Agentstudio, new AI agents, the addition of Boomi Data Integration to the enterprise platform, as well as support for Model Context Protocol.

For instance, users can design, govern and orchestrate AI agents at scale within a no-code environment on Boomi Agentstudio. AI agents are software entities that use AI to perform tasks or services autonomously or semi-autonomously, based on programming, learned behavior and data.

Mr. McLarty said they expect it to be a “very common thing” to have Boomi customers build their own agents.

“Because of the pace of change that’s going on out there, every organization needs to be fairly experimental with things… I think just by the democratized nature of our platform, it makes it easy to experiment… Like, you can try things out, you can experiment with this new technology in a way that’s intuitive, but also you don’t feel like you just had to invest in a whole data science team,” he added.

DIGITAL FRAGMENTATION
However, one of the biggest challenges facing enterprises in their transformation journey is digital fragmentation.

Mani Gill, vice-president for product management at Boomi, said data management has always been a critical issue for organizations, and more important than ever with the rise of AI agents.

“Organizations rely on data to make decisions, run their businesses, and operate their businesses. And now AI agents are thirsty for data, otherwise, these agents are not going to operate properly,” Mr. Gill told BusinessWorld, noting agents will need context for the data.

Boomi last month announced the general availability of Boomi DataHub Command Center, a new module within the Boomi DataHub, that consolidates data management tools, simplifies governance and presents real-time data views.

“Data and AI go hand in hand. Data foundation is super important to successful AI projects, and AI is super important to automate and integrate organizations and businesses… That is partly why we want to democratize the use of building agents and make it available to all of our customers,” Mr. Gill said.

Another challenge for organizations is dealing with the “sprawl problem” when handling significant amounts of data and applications.

“Being able to deal effectively with complexity is probably the main thing that organizations need to do… We have embraced the complexity, so it does make us a natural platform for that,” Mr. McLarty said.

“But the underlying message is there’s no silver bullet. It is a lot of work to deal with the complexity that’s there. But that’s where the opportunity is.”

DALLAS, Texas — Enterprises are turning to Boomi to tackle integration and data management issues, as well as automate business processes using artificial intelligence (AI).

At Boomi World, the company’s top executives announced a major push into AI development that strengthens its core business. It unveiled its Agentstudio that allows enterprises to design their own AI agents, which would help streamline business processes.

“As organizations accelerate AI adoption, the complexity of developing, auditing and managing AI agents will continue to grow, creating governance, security and integration challenges across industries,” Boomi Chief Technology Officer Ed Macosky said.

He said the priority is to provide its customers with a platform that simplifies AI agent deployment and management.

Several Boomi customers shared with BusinessWorld how the Boomi enterprise platform has helped address issues related to data management and integration, and how the company’s new agentic AI offerings will figure into their plans.

NFI INDUSTRIES
Rodney Lucas, senior director of application services at third-party logistics company NFI Industries, said they faced significant integration issues as the company’s volume grew in recent years.

“It even got to the point where our own CEO (chief executive officer) had said that our integration keeps him all that late. And that’s not a good place to be,” he said in an interview.

Started in 1932 by Israel Brown, NFI Industries is a nearly $4-billion company with 18,000 employees, 5,000 trucks and over 30 million square feet of customer warehouse space.

“Prior to moving to Boomi, we had on average 100 tickets that were created in our system regarding integration issues. On average, it was about 100 a month. There were spikes up to 400 a month at times,” Mr. Lucas said.

Since using Boomi, he noticed the tickets have dropped to about 30 a month.

“With the end-to-end monitoring that we put in place, we’re able to get ahead of the issues… Probably the biggest benefit to the company is just that nobody even sees when there’s a failure. We’re taking care of it,” Mr. Lucas said.

“And next step is we want to use AI to help out with that, figure out where the ticket is supposed to route.”

NFI also saw a reduction in integration build times to just 12-16 hours from 40 hours previously.

Mr. Lucas said he is excited about the announcements about new innovations and products at Boomi World.

“We’re trying to get tools in the hands of both our client services teams and our operations teams so that they can self-support. And one of the biggest things that we look at using AI for in the near term is enriching the data,” he added.

HEB CONSTRUCTION
Auckland-based HEB Construction has extended its use of the Boomi Enterprise platform “to maximize the effectiveness of an existing third-party AI-powered road monitoring tool.”

HEB uses Boomi to integrate the AI tool with its geographic information system and central and local government work and asset management platform. This allows the delivery of timely and accurate insights to its maintenance team and clients.

Mircel van der Walt, solutions and architecture manager at HEB Construction, said they have made progress in collecting data, with 25 million records now available for training their AI model.

“It’s a happy coincidence that Boomi started releasing its offerings of how AI can be delivered, maintained, monitored, governed. So that works out great. We don’t have to undo anything,” he said in an interview.

“Our future plan is to use all the new Boomi offerings around the AI space to go build an agent for this specific topic and use it as our fundamental use case to venture into the AI game.”

Mr. Van der Walt said they are planning to use the road maintenance data to build an agent that could predict where faults might exist with a certainty percentage above 80-90%.

“It would be nice to get 95% accuracy on where a pothole would be in the next week. That would be like a superpower. But if we were realistic, it would take us some time to get to that. We’ll reach it but just not tomorrow,” he said.

Having been a Boomi customer for years, Mr. Van der Walt said he is impressed with the company’s continual innovation.

Boomi is also good at listening to customer feedback and incorporating it into their offerings, he said.

“For us, it’s great being part of this family because one, we get the power of the platform and all the very smart people that build it. (Two,) Boomi is very good at listening to us as the customer,” he added.

LEXITAS
Lexitas, a leading provider of technology-enabled litigation services, had acquired around 40 companies since 2020 but soon discovered issues in data management. There were duplicated and inconsistent customer data stored in siloed systems.

Sherry Bourque, chief accounting officer at Lexitas, said they turned to Boomi Data Hub for master data management so it could “tame” all of the customer data from these acquisitions.

It created a unified “golden record” that consolidated disparate data sources. This involved applying a single identifier to a customer.

“We collapsed the number of customers because now there’s one single identifier for that. We are able to do integrations faster because of it. The books get closed faster because once you do the integration you don’t have to go to the manual system to get the sales data and book it,” she said.

This gave Lexitas a 360-degree view of customer information which could be used by the sales and marketing teams. It also gave better financial data from the acquisitions.

“(We are) closing the books faster, getting rid of the noise of all the systems,” she added.

Moving forward, Ms. Bourque said they are looking at using some of Boomi’s AI products.

“We’re going to entertain the idea of some AI and those new AI products that they’re talking about that we can use,” she said.

Lexitas and NFI were also named the winners of the 2025 Boomi Customer Innovation Awards, recognizing enterprises that use Boomi Enterprise Platform to lead digital change. — Cathy Rose A. Garcia