At Boomi World, CEO Lucas Claims AI Is Underhyped
Not even "Coach Prime" Deion Sanders could upstage AI at Boomi World.
![AI hype at Boomi World 2024 AI hype at Boomi World 2024](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt5eef4bb761b40a46/663d3c5fd8cc38442aea33ce/Boomi_World_2024_Band.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Boomi executives have spoken a lot this week about "AI agents," a term that even Boomi CTO Matt McLarty said is not well-defined. And as often happens with poorly defined tech terms, people tend to come up with a definition that fits their purpose.
“There’s no industry definition of AI agents yet,” McLarty said. “Everybody says, ‘I have an agent,’ ‘I have an agent.’ ‘I am Spartacus.’ We need to define what agents are.”
There are a few definitions out there. AWS defines an AI agent as “a software program that can interact with its environment, collect data, and use the data to perform self-determined tasks to meet predetermined goals. Humans set goals, but an AI agent independently chooses the best actions it needs to perform to achieve those goals.”
As an example, AWS uses a contact center AI agent that will automatically ask a customer questions, look up information in documents and solve the customer’s problem itself or pass it on to a human.
The AWS definition fits what much of the talk at Boomi World has been about, and fits Boomi’s API management strategy. For an agent to make decisions, it must make API calls to databases, large-language models (LLMs) and third-party systems. That’s where the API gateways come in that Boomi acquired this week from Mashery and APIIDA.
McLarty said he has focused on API management since he joined Boomi a year ago.
“It’s serendipity that we have this AI explosion,” he said. “Customers can take advantage of AI by using our platform. We’ve spoken of a need to ground generative AI. People need to ground it with their own data, fine-tune it, connect it to their LLMs. We provide all that through APIs. Agents will look a lot like APIs.”
Jeff Lischett, global CIO for Tropicana Brands, spoke of Project Harvest – his company’s name for building itself up after Pepsico sold it in 2021.
“What ends up going into a bottle of orange juice is fruit on a tree from the groves, and so harvest really was about the beginnings of the company,” he said during a Boomi World keynote.
Lischett said rather than replicating its IT setup from what it was at Pepsico, Tropicana took a greenfield approach.
“It was an amazing experience to lead an organization through a really global stand-up-front-and-back IT delivery through the operation model, infrastructure security, and certainly on the app ecosystem,” he said. “And we had about a year-and-a-half to pull this off. We're absolutely excited that we've had the successes we've had.”
Although PAI Partners paid more than $3 billion for Tropicana, Lischett said his company has “the spirit of a startup in that we try to lean into every single day and live our values.” Still, a company the size of Tropicana has “a lot of applications, a lot of data and a lot of capabilities that are needed to run.”
He said Tropicana used Boomi EDI (electronic data interchange) to connect with partners for its transactions and supply chain, and middleware for tie together its systems, applications and data.
“We had limited time to go and execute, so managing complexity was something that was always top of mind in terms of how we prioritize and keep things really tucked in to give us the speed to execute considering the parameters that we dealt with,” Lischett said. “So we put that all on one platform.”
A panel of Boomi partners gathered to talk about how the integration platform has evolved, and where they see it going. Of course, they expect AI to play a big role in Boomi’s future.
“For a long time, Boomi was an IT sell,” said Kitepipe CEO Larry Cone. “It was an IT toolkit that IT would use to solve integration problems. But I think that's really changed. People are now thinking really more about data, and data problems and data opportunities. So Boomi isn’t an integration tool; it's really a data tool. And AI has just helped accelerate that. The lightbulb’s going on; people are understanding that there's a lot of value in their data and thinking about how they can use it more effectively, and how it needs to be cleaned or transformed. In whole platform projects, we've created a lot of value for customers.”
Ramesh Revuru, global head of low code and integration for LTIMindtree, said some see gen AI as a threat to low-code development tools such as Boomi Flow, but he sees the technologies as complementary.
“What low-code tools like Boomi do is provide an opportunity to use less code, that’s the meaning of low code,” he said. “Gen AI is popular for its text, video, image processing capabilities and content creation but is also used for code generation because you use less code when building an application. But while the objective of low code and gen AI are similar, the methods through which you achieve that are completely different.”
Revuru explained that low-code applications such as Flow allow developers to drag and drop to create enterprise applications. Gen AI’s natural language processing ability lets developers use prompts to write code.
“Low code is more citizen-development-driven while generative AI generates a lot of code that somebody has to then look at and put guardrails on it,” he said.
He said he expects gen AI and low code to be used together rather than forcing developers to choose one.
“You're already seeing that with laptops and products like Boomi GPT, putting gen AI capabilities in the platform itself,” Revuru added.
He said these systems could be used to perform tasks such as summarizing a document quickly or creating a message flow automatically through gen AI.
“That’s how we can make the combination of gen AI plus low-code more efficient and faster for the customers,” Revuru said.
At the Boomi Partner Summit, Boomi recognized winners of its 2024 Partner Awards. According to Boomi, “winners were selected based on how they utilized the breadth of the Boomi platform to enable creativity and innovation, scope and complexity, and environmental or social impact.”
The winners:
Global Partner: Infosys
Americas Partner: RSM US
EMEA Partner: Cognizant Technology Solutions
APJ Partner: Atturra
OEM Partner: UKG
ISV Partner: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Technology Partner: Solace
Emerging Technology Partner: Thru
Boomi’s partnership with Infosys includes working with Infosys engineers in an AI lab in India.
“We’re collaborating with them around helping to prepare for the delivery [of AI] and how it impacts customer outcomes,” said Dan McAllister, Boomi SVP of global alliances and channels.
Boomi this week launched an enhanced version of Boomi for SAP delivered through the AWS marketplace. Boomi for SAP helps customers migrate from SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) to SAP Datasphere to prepare for end of support for SAW BW at the end of 2027.
Boomi and RSM US have a strategic alliance to deliver Boomi's low-code integration platform as a service (iPaaS) to RSM’s mid-market assurance, tax and consulting services customers. RSM provides ERP, CRM, human capital management, and managed IT services.
“Coach Prime” Deion Sanders dropped by Boomi World to chat with Boomi CEO Steve Lucas. The University of Colorado football coach spoke of his background that included playing in the NFL and major league baseball simultaneously.
We can’t report what he said because Sanders insisted his appearance was off the record. We can say he did not talk about AI, APIs, cybersecurity or hybrid clouds.
“Coach Prime” Deion Sanders dropped by Boomi World to chat with Boomi CEO Steve Lucas. The University of Colorado football coach spoke of his background that included playing in the NFL and major league baseball simultaneously.
We can’t report what he said because Sanders insisted his appearance was off the record. We can say he did not talk about AI, APIs, cybersecurity or hybrid clouds.
BOOMI WORLD — If you think AI is overhyped with all the attention it gets, Boomi CEO Steve Lucas disagrees with you.
“I think it’s underhyped, is what I think,” Lucas said at Boomi World. “I think people are a little skittish and cautious about it.
“The rate and pace of innovation is like nothing I've ever seen. Now, that may be a little bit of hyperbole, but really not that much," he added. "What I would draw everyone's attention to is, what were we doing 18 months ago? We were meeting ChatGPT. What are we doing today? We're meeting agents that can code. Are they perfect at it? No, we haven't replaced our engineers. Certainly not. But that was 18 months. It's not really a choice.”
![Boomi CEO on stage at Boomi World 2024 in Denver, May 8. Boomi CEO on stage at Boomi World 2024 in Denver, May 8.](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltb387714f8b04d790/663bff70ece60c07f6b95cc5/Steve_Lucas_Boomi_World_Day_2_Feature.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
Boomi CEO on stage at Boomi World 2024 in Denver, May 8.
Lucas said Boomi’s AI agents can help customers as they experiment with generative AI use cases.
“Experimentation now is a very good thing. And if you talk to most organizations, they're trying out things, understanding different scenarios,” he said. “We want to aid in that experimentation, the exploration, the understanding. But the time to explore and experiment is not five years from now. It's now.”
See our slideshow above for more on the AI revolution at Boomi World, plus a visit by "Coach Prime" Deion Sanders.
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