By Cathy Rose A. Garcia, Editor-in-Chief
DENVER, Colorado — Companies should consider how artificial intelligence (AI) can help solve real-world problems instead of looking at it as just another bandwagon, according to a US technology executive.
“Don’t just do AI for AI’s sake,” Boomi Chief Technology Officer Matt McLarty told BusinessWorld on the sidelines of Boomi World 2024 last month.
“Think about how AI can help solve unsolvable problems or problems you couldn’t solve before AI. How can AI optimize what you’re doing?”
He said companies that seek to digitalize would want to reduce friction, provide automation, and offer value-added and data-enriched services.
“If you look in those areas, that’s where AI can help even more,” Mr. McLarty said. “You can use AI to provide even more streamlined experiences, personalization… You can use AI to provide more automation, come up with new business models, new products and services.”
Boomi, an integration and automation company, wants to be front and center in helping companies get value out of AI.
“For companies that are thinking, ‘What do we do about AI?’ Well, what are you trying to do today? And just look at where you can apply AI. And that’s where I think we can help a lot because we can make it less about a giant technological hurdle,” Mr. McLarty said.
“We can help make AI understand your business and provide useful business outcomes, not just write poems, Shakespearean sonnets about cats or whatever.”
The Boomi executive said companies must ensure their AI will be grounded using their own data.
“If you want to get value out of AI, you need to ground it. And if you want to ground it, Boomi is the Earth,” Mr. McLarty said.
As part of its AI suite, the company last year launched a generative AI-powered conversational interface called Boomi GPT. Boomi GPT lets organizations create and generate processes using natural language prompts.
At Boomi World last month, the company unveiled the Boomi AI agent framework, which allows users to run AI agents built by the company or its partners.
It launched four new AI agents built into the platform, namely Boomi Answers, an agent that gives prescriptive help; Boomi DataDetective, which classifies data fields and protects sensitive data; Boomi DesignGen, an agent for autonomously building integrations; and Boomi Scribe, which automatically documents existing and built-by-AI integrations.
“What we’re doing is starting to think about these AI-based features not as features of the platform, but as discrete agents,” Mr. McLarty said.
He said there will also be third-party pluggable AI agents.
“Over time, this will be more of a partner certification effort where we’ll provide guidance on agent building, certification process, onboarding process. And that’s where the marketplace garden of agents will be,” he added.
Another category of agents will be those that its customers can build using the Boomi platform.
“I think the industry will move to this agent architecture,” Mr. McLarty said. “But there’s still time… We would probably be more likely to just help companies orchestrate some AI workflows before we would help, you know, refactor their whole environment into agents.”
