Enterprise AI faces agent management crisis as digital worker lifecycle demands new skills

Navigating agent management and enterprise skills gap - SiliconANGLE

Automating what already exists isn't enough -- agents demand a fundamental rethink of the enterprise Enterprises have figured out how to stand up AI agents, but agent management is another problem entirely. The agentic moment is forcing organizations to interrogate everything, including the operating and business models that underpin longstanding infrastructure. That is because agentic AI requires a fundamentally different approach to process design -- not automating what exists today, but rebuilding workflows from a blank sheet, according to Doug Schmitt (pictured, right), chief information officer of Dell Technologies Inc. and president of Dell Technologies Services. "Clearly, it's the year of agent management -- helping both our customers and delivering [agents] internally as well," Schmitt said. "We're seeing it live. We're seeing it with our supply chain. We're also seeing it with our development. Then, externally, what it's gonna do for healthcare, for education, all of these great opportunities." Schmitt and Scott Bils (left), vice president of professional services at Dell Technologies Inc., spoke with theCUBE's Dave Vellante and Gemma Allen at Dell Technologies World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed agent management governance, token economics and how Dell's dual role as customer zero and services provider gives it a unique vantage point with enterprise clients. (* Disclosure below.) A critical insight emerging from Dell's customer conversations is that early agentic deployments often look like sophisticated robotic process automation rather than genuine transformation -- a pattern teams have had to actively correct internally before taking those lessons to customers, Schmitt explained. "In some of the first agentic cases that we were looking at in services, they were pretty close to really just an RPA," Schmitt said. "We were looking and asking people, 'Okay, where do we want to use the agentic tech?' They came back with what they were doing today and how they automate it. That's not necessarily the correct way to do it. AI gives us a new way to think about things. We could actually reinvent the way we're doing it, white sheet it, get it to AI-native, not just make it a super RPA." The real value of agent management lies in multiagent, end-to-end process transformation rather than point automation, Bils noted. Governance is a multi-layer challenge spanning compliance, security and data lineage -- all of which must be addressed simultaneously. The framework Dell applies internally as customer zero -- deciding where data resides, how governance is structured and which outcomes to optimize for -- is then carried directly into customer engagements. For example, Dell's work with Sandisk Corp. illustrates what that end-to-end agentic transformation can deliver. Using a vision AI and internet-of-things combination deployed through the Dell AI Factory with Nvidia, Dell helped the manufacturer achieve 95% lights-out factory operations, a 45% reduction in CO2 emissions, a 32% cut in operating costs and defect rates dropped from 800 to 100 parts per million, Bils explained. "At the end of the day, where the real value is gonna lie is in kind of end-to-end process and workflow transformation, particularly for multiagent types of deployment and environments," Bils said. "It's not about using agentic to automate what you have today. It's about fundamentally rethinking -- white sheet -- a new way of thinking of process workflow and how you can drive that with agentic." Stay tuned for the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2026.

Boomi World '26 - Boomi rolls out a host of product announcements to tackle the enterprise AI "sh*t show"

The enterprise AI landscape is pretty confused at the moment, or as Boomi CEO Steve Lucas put it: It's a sh*t show. There were a lot of announcements to unpack at Boomi World 26 in Chicago this week. More than 1,700 customers and partners heard product, partnership and acquisition announcements, as Boomi explained how it is going to help customers activate their data in an AI world. In the opening keynote, Lucas said: Organizations don't need more pilots, they need action-ready data. With these innovations, we're providing the infrastructure to put data in motion, ensuring agents are grounded in context and every action is governed with precision. Boomi moves twice the amount of data per second for its 30,000 plus customers, than Visa does every second, every day, all over the world, according to Lucas, but only 7% of enterprise data is currently in motion. Lucas commented: When I looked at that number, I realized we are way more about the journey for the data than the destination. Our job is to help move data, get information to the right place, to the right people, to the right agents, get it wherever it needs to go, and make sure it's done in real time with quality and context. In the view of Ed Macosky, Boomi Chief Product & Technology Officer, the most important announcement at Boomi World 26 was Boomi Connect, a security and governance layer that makes enterprise AI production ready, and bridges leading AI interfaces including Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT Enterprise, and Microsoft Copilot to over 1,000 enterprise tools through a managed MCP service with secure, authenticated, and metered execution built directly into the tools teams already use. Macosky said: For me, the most exciting announcement is Boomi Connect. It is one of the biggest opportunities we've had, because we've truly simplified governing and managing connectivity between AI data sources and enterprise applications, we've just made it that simple. And to me, the beauty is in the simplicity. This is boosted by Boomi's planned acquisition of Lunar.dev, an innovator in AI and MCP gateway tech. Macosky explained: The Lunar.dev acquisition will add an extreme amount of value to the Boomi Connect story, and will make us very differentiated. I am very excited about that. In addition to the Lunar stuff, we'll add a lot of capabilities, broader platform wise, but again, adding to the simplicity, adding these capabilities. And the Lunar folks are very, very smart humans, and I'm very excited about them, just as much, if not more, than the technology. But customers at Boomi World have been most enthusiastic about the announcement of Boomi Companion, according to Macosky. Companion uses agentic engineering, so the AI tools already being used can design, build, test, deploy, and diagnose integrations through natural language. It can be installed into coding agents like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or chat tools like Claude Cowork, and the agent uses the Boomi platform knowledge to handle the full integration lifecycle. Macosky said: For our customers Boomi Companion is what they want and is what they are most excited about, because it is helping simplify their jobs, and expand the ability to support more users in their business. They can do things faster, plug Boomi into these AI tools to do more, and manage the platform better and faster. It helps supercharge their go to markets and their projects. Boomi announced a strategic collaboration with open source solutions provider, Red Hat, to deliver a single, integrated stack for deploying agentic AI at scale, which should simplify AI innovation by bringing together Boomi's Agentstudio with the enterprise-grade Red Hat AI. Macosky went on: What we're doing with the autonomous runtime is also very exciting. We are launching that in the coming months, and that will be a game changing offering from us. We already have one of our biggest differentiators today which is to help enterprises bridge between Cloud and SaaS. Most of our customers do that in the integration and connectivity areas. We are bringing those same capabilities to their AI projects and helping them manage that, and save the cost by allowing them to run these models locally. Other technologies allow you to run models locally, but pulling it all together to give the business outcomes that we already get on our platform, we think, is extremely powerful. There were also many product announcements covering a range of new capabilities across orchestrated agentic workflows, agentic engineering, governed agent connectivity, grounded agent context, and localized agent infrastructure among them MCP Registry Scale AI, which uses a centralized catalog to discover, govern and manage MCP servers across Boomi and third party registries, as well as Boomi Orchestrate which lets teams combine agents, APIs, integrations, event streams and data models into one universal orchestration using natural language. Macosky explained: Every enterprise transformation has a platform moment. For agentic AI, that moment is now. Customers don't need more disconnected tools, they need an active data foundation that connects data, orchestrates workflows, and governs AI for people and agents. In Agentic Engineering, as well as Boomi Companion, Embedding Agentstudio Agents also debuted. Whilst newly announced Boomi Knowledge Hub gets rid of knowledge silos, and offers a single, unified context layer, and Boomi Meta Hub which promises to improve agent accuracy, eliminate fragmented interpretation and ensure consistent business logic at scale. This works. Our platform really works. And I know everybody else is saying it does, but I want to show you that it works. It actually does. There were plenty of examples on show to back up the stated ambition of Macosky. The Boomi story continues to evolve. Two years ago it was an integration and automation company, last year it was a leader in AI driven automation, and in 2026 it has become a data activation company. Its messaging has evolved as AI projects have rampaged in the enterprise space, and added more complexity to the already difficult lives of IT teams. This year Boomi World was all about getting data moving and really working for organizations, whilst trying to simplify AI projects, do things faster, and manage better through innovations like Boomi Companion.

Managing the digital worker lifecycle in the enterprise - SiliconANGLE

From performance reviews to pink slips, managing AI agents looks a lot like managing people The workforce is no longer purely human -- and closing the gap between how companies manage people and how they govern AI agents has become one of the defining operational challenges of the digital worker lifecycle. As agentic AI spreads across every facet of the enterprise, IBM Corp. is betting that the same management rigor applied to human employees must now extend to digital workers. The core of that thesis is the digital worker lifecycle -- a structured approach to hiring, credentialing, deploying and retiring AI agents with the same discipline organizations that has long governed people management, according to Mohamad Ali (pictured), senior vice president and head of IBM Consulting at IBM. That perspective started when IBM CEO Arvind Krishna charged Ali with building a software layer capable of managing human and digital workers side by side. "Arvind called me and we had a conversation about three years ago and he said, 'I want you to come over and I want you to be a consulting business,'" Ali said. "'What is digital labor? It's a whole bunch of bits of software. I need you to come in and I need you to build this set of software and do it in a way that it could be managed. You could think of this as HR management ... but now you have to HR manage human workers and digital workers.'" Ali spoke with theCUBE's John Furrier and Dave Vellante at the Think 2026 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed the digital worker lifecycle, AI-driven business transformation across IBM's client base and how IBM Consulting is applying its own client zero methodology to prove out enterprise AI ROI. (* Disclosure below.) The IBM framework moves well beyond basic agent deployment. The IBM Consulting Advantage platform now runs more than 4,000 digital workers across 450 active projects, operating on infrastructure that includes AWS GovCloud and other secure environments. The approach gives individual teams freedom to build on any AI stack -- IBM watsonx, Anthropic, OpenAI -- while routing everything through a common management layer that provides full observability and control over the agent fleet, according to Ali. The agents who then go unused don't linger -- they get cut off. "If you build an agent that nobody's using, eventually we're going to decommission it," Ali said. "We're going to starve it. It's not going to get tokens, it's going to retire." The credentialing dimension of the digital worker lifecycle is where IBM's work with Pearson PLC breaks new ground. Rather than testing agents on memorizable material, IBM and Pearson are applying workflow-centric assessments through Pearson's Credly platform to issue skill badges -- such as cloud essentials or security -- directly to AI agents, Ali explained. The approach was developed with Dave Treat, who leads the credentialing initiative at Pearson, and solves a core verification problem. "You can't just give the agent the textbook -- it'll just memorize it and get all the answers right," he said. "What Dave is doing is a much more sophisticated way -- giving the agent problems, workflow problems it's never seen before. He doesn't have to grade it on multiple choice because he's got an agent grading an agent. You can actually have our agent do a complex workflow thing and another agent grade how it did that in that workflow -- a workflow that it's never seen before." The business case for getting this right is concrete. IBM's own consulting business expanded profits by 20% from 2024 to 2025 after decomposing its operations into 490 workflows, re-engineering 70 of them and applying AI systematically -- a playbook that is now showing up in client results, Ali noted. U.S. non-profit Providence Health & Services, which deployed watsonx-powered HR agents integrated with its existing Oracle Corp. infrastructure, is now recruiting nurses 12 days faster, a sign that workflow-level AI transformation -- not broad license rollouts -- is where the value actually lives. "We took a $25 billion spend and we've actually [saved in productivity] four and a half billion of that spend," Ali said. "That only happened because we decomposed our company into these 490 workflows, took 70 of them, re-engineered them and did it the hard way." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of the Think 2026 event:

Multi-agent orchestration and the crawl-walk-run path to AI - SiliconANGLE

Before enterprises can run with agentic AI, they need to learn to walk with their data Multi-agent orchestration is the destination, but for most enterprises, the road is blocked long before the first agent gets deployed by the quality of the data feeding those systems. As organizations accelerate investment in agentic workflows, a persistent gap between AI ambition and operational reality is widening. Legacy systems were built for a world where humans supplied the interpretive logic that data alone could not. In the agentic era, that undocumented knowledge must be surfaced, codified and connected before multi-agent orchestration can deliver real return on investment, according to Patricia B. Moore (pictured), AI field chief technology officer and innovation lead at Boomi LP. "It starts with trust. You have to have context in order to have that trust to have agentic solutions that are actually going to deliver value; you need your data to be connected, you need your systems to be automated," she said. "The idea behind artificial intelligence is that there is intelligence, and in order to have intelligence, you need to have the right information." Moore spoke with theCUBE's Gemma Allen at Boomi World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed how enterprises can clear the data trust hurdle and build toward multi-agent orchestration without abandoning the investments they have already made. (* Disclosure below.) The difficulty of moving from single-agent pilots to multi-agent orchestration at enterprise scale is reshaping how integration companies position themselves. Boomi launched Meta Hub earlier this year specifically to address what it calls the "tribal knowledge tax" -- critical business definitions trapped in undocumented silos that cause agents operating without a human in the loop to make context-free decisions. To illustrate the problem, Moore presented an example: Ask three departments to define an "active customer," and the finance, operations and sales teams each return a different answer. Without a semantic layer to reconcile those definitions, agents will act on conflicting data, she added. "When you have agents making decisions without a human in the loop, they need to understand the things that aren't normally documented," she said. "In this new agentic world, we have to think about, 'How do we take that knowledge that has historically sat within our workforce and document it somewhere, whether it's in business glossaries or elsewhere, to be able to feed that to the agents?'" Boomi's positioning in the market -- with more than 30,000 customers and lessons drawn from years of API management -- gives it a structural advantage as enterprises try to carry forward existing integrations into the agentic era, Moore added. The company is now applying the same governance principles it developed for application programming interface management directly to agent management, underpinned by a crawl-walk-run path to success. "You need to pick those use cases that are going to be those quick wins to build confidence," Moore said. "First, you're going to automate -- you're going to learn from those automations so that you can agentify. Then once you build confidence in those agents, then we can start talking about multi-agent orchestration. You have to crawl before you walk, walk before you run, and we're helping our customers at every stage of that journey." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2026:

Assured autonomy and the bridge to AI production - SiliconANGLE

Agentic success has a prerequisite -- building the systems most enterprises left undone Enterprises racing toward assured autonomy in agentic AI are running headlong into a decades-old problem: Most of their infrastructure was never designed to be connected -- let alone governed at the speed AI demands. Only about 30% of the enterprise is truly connected today -- a fragmentation driven by accumulated technical debt, siloed IT stacks and legacy mainframe systems built across eras that were never designed to speak to each other, according to Dan McAllister (pictured, right), senior vice president for global alliances and channels at Boomi LP. Bridging that gap is now a prerequisite for the agentic enterprise Boomi is building toward -- and paradoxically, the very technology creating that urgency may be the only thing capable of meeting it. "The reason why mainframe still exists is there's still a lot of value in those systems," McAllister said. "With the advent of AI, we're going to see two things: A continued explosion of new applications for technology, and then an increase in the need to go all the way back to the original data sources in the mainframe. Now, that integration -- how are we even going to stay at 30%? Well, we're leveraging AI." McAllister and Terese Pate (left), global chief technology officer for enterprise transformation platforms at DXC Technology Co., spoke with theCUBE's Gemma Allen at Boomi World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed the Boomi-DXC partnership, the barriers holding enterprises back from full connectivity and the path to assured autonomy in agentic deployments. (* Disclosure below.) The connective tissue problem runs deeper than legacy code. DXC Technology -- which built a dedicated Boomi practice after nearly nine months of deepened partnership -- has seen firsthand how the long-standing divide between engineering teams and the boardroom has been just as much a barrier to full connectivity as technical debt, according to Pate. "IT was so separate from business -- you had the IT stacks and they're working on it, and then the business had their piece," Pate said. "This age of AI really brings them together. You still get the business you've got to bring to the IT parts ... and learning how to speak the same language, to build it, to gain the trust -- it takes time." That trust question sits at the heart of the assured autonomy challenge. Boomi is addressing it directly through tools such as Boomi Companion -- a collection of open-source agent skills for building production-ready enterprise software through natural language -- and its intent to acquire Lunar.dev, an AI and Model Context Protocol gateway provider designed to enforce policy-driven control and observability over every agent interaction at scale. These developments all serve Boomi's wider goal of getting enterprises across the trust threshold, according to McAllister. "Do I actually trust [agents] to move beyond the four walls of my cube, and can I deploy it across my business?" he said. "In some use cases, yes. Some life-and-death use cases -- absolutely not. We have to have the right data feeding it and monitor it and govern it and secure it in the process to ultimately get to a point where, 'Yeah, we actually do trust the outcome here,' and we're in this learning phase now." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2026:

Fully autonomous AI demands a new enterprise anchor - SiliconANGLE

Dell's CTO says stop bolting AI onto brownfield and start treating legacy as a feeder, not a foundation Fully autonomous AI has crossed the threshold from concept to commercial reality, forcing enterprises to rethink the very foundation on which they run their businesses. The shift is arriving faster than most organizations anticipated, bringing with it an urgent new set of economic and architectural demands. But the pressure is especially acute for enterprises that still treat legacy infrastructure as the center of their technology universe, according to John Roese (pictured), global chief technology officer and chief AI officer at Dell Technologies Inc. Now, as agentic AI moves from buzzword to board-level priority, the conversation has gone from possibility to implementation -- and cost. "I was introducing people to the word 'agentic' about a year ago," Roese said. "Now we've realized that this idea of fully autonomous AI systems -- of really shifting work into the machine layer -- is now very real. At the same time ... the word 'tokennomics' is now in our vernacular because we've realized that when you put these things into production at scale, the cost of different patterns of what you deploy are incredibly variable. Having a smart, intelligent way to use your hybrid infrastructure, to put the right workload in the right place to use the right model, is actually not just a nice-to-have -- it's required." Roese spoke with theCUBE's John Furrier and Dave Vellante at Dell Technologies World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed fully autonomous AI infrastructure, the economics of hybrid deployment and the emergence of AI-centric engineering as a new organizational discipline. (* Disclosure below.) Roese has consistently suggested that success in this era won't come from chasing every AI breakthrough, but from building infrastructure capable of keeping pace -- a view that puts the company squarely at odds with how most enterprises are currently approaching the problem. The legacy-versus-AI debate is one enterprises are increasingly getting wrong, with many attempting to bolt AI capabilities onto existing legacy, or "brownfield," environments, he added. "The biggest impediment to navigating the legacy environment into the AI era is this mistake of thinking you're doing it by having the legacy environment be the anchor," he said. "The only way it works is [if] you actually have an AI environment. You have to have a place to build agents and run them autonomously. You have to have a security architecture that works with agentic. The brownfield becomes a feeder system to the new AI environment, but if you don't have the AI environment at all, you're just putting some AI features around a brownfield." That infrastructure philosophy extends directly into data. The Dell AI Data Platform is an example of what it means to treat data not as a separate concern but as an integral component of the AI factory itself, according to Roese. The hardest work in any advanced agent deployment has been data plumbing, specifically converting institutional knowledge into knowledge graphs and ontologies that agents can actually use. "An agent that just has access to a large language model is not an enterprise agent," he said. "An enterprise agent also has access to a knowledge graph that organizes the proprietary enterprise knowledge. If you give an agent both of those, and the knowledge graph is ground truth, it behaves better, it is more relevant, it is more aligned to your business." As enterprises mature those agentic deployments, the question shifts from whether agents can do the work to whether they can do it reliably. Rather than allowing agents to improvise, Dell has embedded digitized process knowledge directly into its agentic systems -- giving them a defined playbook to draw from, Roese explained. The distinction matters because unpredictable agents, however capable, cannot be trusted with the workflows that actually run businesses. "We are big believers in digitized process," he said. "In the old world, that digitized process led humans around. In the new world, when we build agents, one of the tools they use to accomplish work is they go to our digitized processes. The value of giving agents more information about what the process is -- how they should work, rather than letting them invent -- just makes them more predictable and more scalable." Stay tuned for the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2026.

Enterprise AI integration scales with agentic platforms - SiliconANGLE

Enterprises are facing an integration problem no model alone can fix Enterprise AI integration has become the defining challenge for organizations moving from pilot programs to production -- and the companies solving it are reshaping how work gets done across every industry. However, the path to measurable results is rarely straightforward. As agentic technologies evolve, companies are now shifting away from traditional integration models toward more intelligent, automated platforms, according to Sven Loberg (pictured, left), managing director at Accenture PLC. Accenture's work with Boomi sits at the center of that shift -- a partnership that has watched Boomi evolve from a conventional integration platform-as-a-service provider into a platform built for an agentic-first world. "We're seeing [an inflection point] in the product space with Boomi and how they're approaching it, which was, if you thought about them a decade ago, it was very much traditional integration ... and now it's become an agentic world and they're thinking about agentic," Loberg said. "Our customers and citizen developers can start to use, and become super users, as far as building their own systems." Loberg and Dan McAllister (right), senior vice president for global Alliances and channels at Boomi, spoke with theCUBE's John Furrier at Boomi World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed the shift from AI pilots to enterprise-scale deployment and how agentic architectures and enterprise AI integration are transforming business operations. (* Disclosure below.) Organizations are actively looking to push innovation forward across the enterprise, but many initiatives are still limited by fragmented data and the lack of access to unified information systems, McAllister said. For Boomi, the answer lies in connectivity -- bridging powerful AI models to the sprawling, distributed data that enterprises actually run on. The challenge runs deeper than just scattered data, as the business logic governing how that data is used is equally fragmented. "It's not just all of the data and all the systems, but it's some of the data in some of the systems and the rest of it is somewhere else, or it's being created, or it's been distributed elsewhere," McAllister said. "But then those business rules as well are also locked in different systems." With the infrastructure now catching up to AI's ambition, that fragmentation is precisely what Boomi Connect was built to solve -- unifying models, data, and business rules across the enterprise into a single, accessible platform. Combining that integration layer with deep industry and line-of-business expertise is what sets the Boomi-Accenture partnership apart, McAllister said. "We're going to see massive adoption in the next 12 months. We've been all moving up to this point, getting closer to the edge about taking those initial risks," McAllister said. "We've probably been held back a little, because we didn't trust the outcome -- but we're really solving those problems and getting to a point where we can trust outcomes on a predictable basis." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World:

Boomi And Couchbase Partner To Power Enterprise AI Agents With Trusted Recollect...

Boomi, the data activation company for AI, and Couchbase, Inc., the operational data platform for AI, today announced a partnership through which the two companies are collaborating closely to accelerate AI pilots to production. The companies will co-engineer solutions that give customers a production-ready foundation for agentic AI, combining Boomi's connectivity, runtime, and governance for AI agents with Couchbase's scalable recollection and vector capabilities. Enterprises deploying AI agents today face a common challenge: while agents perform well in pilots, they struggle to scale due to inconsistent access to trusted context, recollection, and real-time business data. Lack of governance, auditability, and operational control drives up compute costs while diminishing productivity and revenue. "2026 is the year organisations move from AI experimentation to activation at scale," said Ed Macosky, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Boomi. "The challenge isn't building agents, it's giving them the data, memory, and governance they need to operate in real enterprise environments. By partnering with Couchbase, we're delivering a unified foundation that enables AI to run securely, efficiently, and at scale, with the trust and control our customers expect." AI systems remain difficult to govern, audit, and operationalise across the enterprise. Together, Boomi and Couchbase are addressing this challenge by enabling AI agents to operate on live, trusted enterprise data, maintain context across interactions, and execute with the governance and control required for production environments. The partnership between Boomi and Couchbase brings together two highly complementary platforms to deliver a unified foundation for enterprise AI. Boomi provides the active data foundation, enabling integration across hundreds of applications, APIs, and data sources, along with agent lifecycle management through Boomi Agentstudio and universal governance via the Agent Control Tower. Couchbase delivers the operational data foundation, supporting real-time data access, trusted recollection, and semantic and hybrid retrieval within a single, high-performance platform. Together, these capabilities enable enterprises to build AI agents that can reason over real business data, retain context, and operate securely across the systems that run the business. "Customers are looking to drive revenue growth, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage through agentic applications," said Barry Morris, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Couchbase. "They have obtained the availability, distributed scale, and performance that Couchbase has delivered in mission-critical environments for more than a decade, and are now looking to deploy agentic applications that exploit that foundation. Together with Boomi, we're delivering trusted data access, recollection, and enterprise-grade governance, making it easier for organisations to operationalise AI across the business." The partnership delivers the following critical outcomes for enterprises building and operating AI agents: For the enterprises already running more than 90,000 AI agents in production on the Boomi Enterprise Platform and the thousands more preparing for deployment, this partnership enables agents to maintain persistent context and retrieve the right business information in milliseconds. Agents now operate under the same rigorous governance, observability, and audit controls customers already trust for their mission-critical integrations. This collaboration directly addresses the data activation challenge: the reality that AI only delivers real business value when agents can operate on action-ready data, with trust and control built in.

Boomi And Red Hat Team Up To Deliver Production-Ready Agentic AI

Boomi, the data activation company for AI, and Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a strategic collaboration to deliver a single, integrated stack for deploying agentic AI at scale. For many organisations, building production AI today means assembling numerous disconnected vendor choices spanning agent builders, orchestration tools, governance platforms, model providers, integration middleware, and security infrastructure, which can lead to data leaks and unpredictable costs. Boomi and Red Hat are working together to simplify AI innovation for customers by bringing together Boomi's Agentstudio with the enterprise-grade power of Red Hat AI. This makes it easier for organisations to build agents that solve real business problems while supporting corporate standards for sovereignty, infrastructure flexibility, and performance reliability. Together, Boomi and Red Hat are collaborating to deliver an integrated solution designed to simplify how organisations operationalise AI by: · Activating AI with real-time, trusted enterprise data: Boomi Agentstudio connects AI agents directly to live, trusted data across every application, system, and process the business runs on, moving beyond demo data or sample workflows. · Extending trusted AI operations across complex workflows: Boomi Agent Control Tower and Boomi's Gateway establish deterministic guardrails to help enforce policy, and are designed to provide visibility into agent actions. Boomi's orchestration layer coordinates agents to mitigate rogue execution and cost leakage, while Red Hat AI's open source foundation and application observability services help deliver continuous governance and trust. · Running and optimising AI performance and cost at scale: Red Hat AI provides an integrated AI fabric with a Kubernetes-native runtime for high-performance inferencing; security-optimised agents; and integrated AI governance; deployable across hybrid cloud environments, including sovereign data centres. Furthermore, Boomi's intelligent model router is designed to optimise costs by assigning agent prompts to the right model in real time based on task complexity and data sensitivity. "Every enterprise leader I talk to is asking the same question: how do I get real AI ROI without losing control of my data, my security posture, or my budget?" said Steve Lucas, Chairman and CEO at Boomi. "The answer isn't stitching together dozens of vendors; it's having a unified platform. With Red Hat, we're giving organisations the ability to activate their data, orchestrate AI across the business, and run it with enhanced security in their own environment at a cost that makes AI viable at scale." "The next era of the enterprise will be defined by those who can move AI from a centralised experiment to a distributed business reality," said Mike Ferris, said Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Operations Officer at Red Hat. "By combining Red Hat's enterprise open source AI foundation with Boomi's agentic orchestration, we are helping organisations with the architectural sovereignty to lead in AI without compromising their data, their costs, or their future autonomy." By combining Boomi's active data foundation with Red Hat's open hybrid cloud capabilities, organisations can replace fragmented systems and tools with a unified foundation that helps reduce complexity and lower operational costs. This approach is designed to support data sovereignty by keeping enterprise data within controlled environments, helping enterprises move beyond AI pilots toward production-ready systems that can scale. Join the Boomi World keynotes live in Chicago on LinkedIn to hear the latest from Boomi executives, customers, and partners:

SaaS applications transform in the headless enterprise - SiliconANGLE

AI agents are turning SaaS applications into headless, deterministic engines SaaS applications are being transformed into deterministic engines as AI agents replace traditional user interfaces and drive the rise of the headless enterprise -- where AI, not humans, serves as the primary interface for business systems. As software companies rush to position themselves as headless, the challenge for enterprises is bridging decades of legacy applications with an agentic future while maintaining governance and cost control. That tension is shaping Boomi LP's product strategy, according to Ed Macosky (pictured), chief product and technology officer at Boomi. "In your organization, you have a whole series of applications that you rely on to run your business. The traditional enterprise, up until recently, would have to have different teams working in different systems because they each had a head or a user experience you had to move into," Macosky said. "With the introduction of AI, we actually help bridge to let AI be the head while the applications are headless. The user experience comes through your agentic experiences and makes your applications and your data more ubiquitous in your world. It's not about no user experience, it's actually about unlocking the user experience to be multimodal and give different access to the system." Macosky spoke with theCUBE's John Furrier and Gemma Allen at Boomi World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed the headless enterprise, SaaS applications and Boomi's platform strategy for governed agentic workflows. (* Disclosure below.) The headless enterprise concept is forcing SaaS companies to rethink their core value proposition. Rather than competing on user interface design, application providers are repositioning as deterministic rules engines -- the referees that govern what AI agents can and cannot do, Macosky explained. "The SaaS [companies] and the application [companies] are realizing that the true value of the application isn't necessarily the user experience," he said. "These SaaS applications are moving themselves into being even more valuable in terms of being the referees for AI trying to do things." One of the emergent themes at Boomi World revolves around combining deterministic processes with agentic AI workflows. Purely agentic chains -- agents calling agents calling agents -- can become prohibitively expensive, according to Macosky. By pairing agentic technology with deterministic workflows for straightforward tasks such as running payroll or submitting expense reports, enterprises can keep costs under control. "An agent calling a tool that is just a deterministic workflow -- 'run payroll' or 'submit expense report' -- that is a very straightforward and very cheap thing to do," Macosky said. "If that was purely agentic without Boomi underneath it, those would be agents running agents, and the cost has a chance to explode with token consumption." Looking ahead, Boomi is betting on hybrid AI infrastructure as the next frontier. The company announced a strategic collaboration with Red Hat Inc. to deliver a single, integrated stack for deploying agentic AI at scale, bringing together Boomi's Agentstudio with Red Hat AI so organizations can run open-weight models privately, Macosky noted. The priority for the year ahead is unlocking those hybrid workloads in a governed, secure manner -- keeping enterprise data in controlled environments rather than routing it through public frontier model providers. "We are laser focused on [how we've] simplified the development of agents," he said. "Over this next year, helping our enterprise customers unlock the workloads that they want to agentify -- that they can't unlock in a secure way -- is what I'm excited about for the next frontier." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2026:

Boomi Unveils Innovations That Power The Agentic Enterprise

Boomi, the data activation company for AI, today announced a major expansion of the Boomi Enterprise Platform at Boomi World 2026, introducing new capabilities across orchestrated agentic workflows, agentic engineering, governed agent connectivity, grounded agent context, and localised agent infrastructure. Together, these innovations are designed to power the agentic enterprise -- where agents and humans work together to drive action and operationalise AI at scale. The enterprise has reached a defining moment as AI becomes the primary interface for work and MCP emerges as the new standard. While the shift toward a headless, agentic enterprise is inevitable, this vision is colliding with skyrocketing cloud costs and trapped data. For many, layering agents onto a fragmented landscape only magnifies governance gaps and operational risk. Boomi addresses these challenges with an active data foundation that connects, governs, and orchestrates every layer of the business. By unifying IT, developers, knowledge workers, and AI agents, Boomi provides the secure and trusted foundation required to operate wherever business happens. "Every enterprise transformation has a platform moment. For agentic AI, that moment is now," said Ed Macosky, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Boomi. "Customers don't need more disconnected tools, they need an active data foundation that connects data, orchestrates workflows, and governs AI for people and agents. With these new innovations, we're extending the Boomi Enterprise Platform to make that foundation a reality." As enterprises accelerate AI adoption, many are encountering challenges in scaling beyond initial use cases due to fragmented systems and lack of operational infrastructure. To address this, Boomi introduced new capabilities across five core areas: · Boomi Connect Provides secure, governed connectivity between AI tools (e.g. Claude, Copilot, Gemini) and enterprise applications through 1000+ managed, MCP-enabled tools. Boomi AI Gateway enables built-in policy enforcement, cost controls, and observability. · MCP Registry Scale AI with control through a centralised catalog to discover, govern, and manage MCP servers across Boomi and third-party registries. · Boomi Orchestrate Helps customers turn business ideas into enterprise-grade agentic workflows faster. Business and IT teams are empowered to combine agents, APIs, integrations, event streams, and data models into one universal orchestration experience using natural language. · Agent SIM (Labs Innovation preview) Allows organisations to simulate and validate agent behavior before deployment, increasing confidence and reducing operational risk. · Boomi Companion Accelerate agentic engineering on the Boomi platform. Developers can now design, build, test, deploy, and diagnose integrations through natural language using their preferred AI tools. · Embedding Agentstudio Agents Activate agents where your team works with new APIs and embedding capabilities. Developers can invoke Boomi agents from any architecture or pipeline, while non-technical users can securely surface them within custom apps, portals, and digital experiences. · Boomi Knowledge Hub Eliminate knowledge silos and deliver accurate, governed search and retrieval across your enterprise. A single, unified context layer ensures AI agents and people always work from trusted, up-to-date information. · Boomi Meta Hub Ground AI agents and people in trusted, expert-endorsed business definitions improving agent accuracy, eliminating fragmented interpretations, and ensuring consistent business logic at scale. · Distributed Agent Runtime Reduce cloud latency and control costs by deploying agents on-premises while keeping sensitive data behind the firewall. This approach supports data privacy and infrastructure control through locally-hosted runtimes and language models. · Agentstudio Multi-region Instances Scale agents globally and confidently by leaving agent metadata and runtime execution in specified regions, enforcing AI boundaries and regional compliance. Together, these innovations position Boomi as the orchestration and governance layer for the headless enterprise -- where AI agents dynamically interact with enterprise systems without relying on traditional application interfaces. By combining integration, automation, API management, data readiness, and agent governance into a single platform, Boomi enables organisations to activate trusted data across the enterprise, orchestrate workflows spanning humans and AI agents, govern execution in real time, and scale AI with confidence. "Through our participation in Boomi's design partner program, we've had early exposure to Boomi Orchestrate and its potential to simplify how we design and execute complex workflows," said Venkata Kalikrishna Chekka, Senior Manager, Enterprise Integration Solutions at Suffolk. "The ability to bring together integrations, APIs, and emerging AI-driven capabilities into a unified orchestration layer is a meaningful step forward. It gives us a more flexible foundation to streamline operations and explore how agent-driven processes can drive greater efficiency across the business." "The market is rapidly shifting toward platforms that can support not just connectivity, but governed execution across AI-driven workflows," said Alexander Wurm, Principal Analyst, Nucleus. "As enterprises move beyond experimentation, the ability to orchestrate data, APIs, and agents within a unified architecture is becoming a critical requirement for scaling AI." "We're entering the next phase of enterprise AI, where success won't be defined by how many agents you deploy, but by how well they are connected, governed, and grounded in trusted data," said Steve Lucas, Chairman and CEO at Boomi. "With more than 30,000 customers and AI guided by hundreds of millions of integrations, we're helping organisations move from connected and automated to fully agentic, and turn AI into real operational impact." Product availability and timing may vary and are subject to change. · Read the Boomi blog for more details on this announcement and what it means for enterprises Join the Boomi World keynotes live in Chicago on LinkedIn to hear the latest from Boomi executives, customers, and partners:

Boomi Companion plans to agentic engineering pay off - SiliconANGLE

Boomi CTO: Agentic engineering is how enterprise AI finally earns its keep Three years of enterprise AI investment, and most companies are still waiting for the payoff. Boomi LP thinks it has found it, unveiling Boomi Companion, a collection of open-source agent skills that lets developers build, deploy and test fully configured Boomi solutions through natural language instructions. The announcement reflects a broader shift now taking shape across the industry, with the move from AI hype to hands-on value arriving not through better chatbots or smarter dashboards, but through tools that let developers build production-ready enterprise software with natural language instructions. As agentic AI moves from experimentation toward operational scale, the companies that have invested in platform-native AI capabilities are finding themselves well ahead of those that waited, according to Matt McLarty (pictured), chief technology officer at Boomi. "I think that since ChatGPT exploded ... everyone's been seeing the inevitability of the AI revolution," McLarty said. "But in practice, a lot of enterprises are [saying], 'It's hype, but I'm not seeing the value yet.' The agentic engineering space is really more refined than anywhere else yet. That's what we're seeing with our customers and partners -- they're [saying], 'We were excited, we've been excited for three years, but we've also been wondering when's the payoff?' This is the payoff." McLarty spoke with theCUBE's John Furrier and Gemma Allen at Boomi World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed Boomi Companion, the future of agentic engineering and how enterprises should balance deterministic and probabilistic processing as AI reshapes the software development lifecycle. (* Disclosure below.) Enterprise developers have long had to choose between the speed of low-code tooling and the power of full-platform configuration -- a tradeoff that Boomi Companion is designed to eliminate. Launched at Boomi World 2026, Boomi Companion is a collection of open-source agent skills built on Anthropic PBC's open standard that allows any AI coding agent -- including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex or Microsoft Copilot -- to build, deploy, test and diagnose fully configured Boomi solutions through natural language, McLarty explained. "As opposed to a typical old-fashioned code generation thing that might come up with a little skeleton thing, 'Hey, here's what you might do,' and then you have to go fill in the details, Companion actually builds a fully robust solution," McLarty said. "It deploys it, it tests it, it checks its results, it iterates through, it learns, it talks to the user. It's one of those things that it's almost a little too magical in terms of what it can do." The key distinction underpinning that "magic" is between agentic engineering and what the industry often calls vibe coding -- a term describing hobbyist-style, shot-in-the-dark generation that produces brittle output, according to McLarty. Companion, by contrast, was built by an expert Boomi builder as a digital twin of deep platform expertise, embedding best practices directly into the agent's skills so that every solution it generates is structured, scalable and production-ready. "It's not just barfing out a bunch of bespoke code and saying, 'Here's a big blob, go implement this,'" he said. "It's actually built on best practices of a tried-and-true enterprise platform. The graphical interface takes on a new role -- if I do build all this stuff, what did I just build? We have a way of showing how it's built, structuring it, and you can still tweak it that way if you want. It's like a bidirectional best-of-both-worlds." Beyond the immediate build capability, McLarty sees Companion as the foundation for a broader architectural rethink that every enterprise software team now faces. Drawing on his IT Revolution article applying Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" framework to agentic systems, the core challenge is not replacing deterministic processing, but knowing when to augment it with probabilistic reasoning -- and designing systems that do both deliberately, McLarty explained. "Getting the balance right between deterministic processing and probabilistic processing is the biggest architectural challenge that's going to hit the software architecture," McLarty said. "I think it's really a new paradigm of software architecture. We went through object-oriented, we went through service-oriented, we went through API-first, microservices -- this is a bit of a bigger leap, but it's the prevailing software architecture practices that introduce probabilistic processing into real-time workloads." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2026:

Agent governance in focus for the Boomi-AWS alliance - SiliconANGLE

Boomi and AWS built the guardrails for agents before anyone was asking for them Agent governance has gone from niche concern to boardroom prerequisite -- and the enterprises that saw it coming are now pulling ahead. The rise of agentic AI across enterprise operations has made governance infrastructure not just a compliance consideration but a competitive advantage for unlocking real return on investment. Boomi LP, which began as an integration-platform-as-a-service company before evolving into a broader AI orchestration platform, wagered early that control would matter as much as raw capability, according to Ann Maya (pictured, left), global head of strategic projects and EMEA chief technology officer at Boomi. "We were way ahead of the curve in AI," Maya said. "Last year we released Agent Control Tower. We got into the governance game super early. Maybe there were some people going, 'Why do you need that?' Now, everybody is asking for some level of governance." Maya and Nicole Bradley (right), principal account executive at Amazon Web Services Inc., spoke with theCUBE's John Furrier and Gemma Allen at Boomi World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed agent governance, the Boomi-AWS alliance and the evolution of the enterprise builder persona. (* Disclosure below.) The Boomi-AWS alliance reflects a broader industry recognition that no single company can provide every answer as agentic workloads scale across hybrid and multicloud environments. The collaboration, which integrates Amazon Bedrock with Boomi's Agent Control Tower, gives enterprises a centralized management solution for agent governance wherever they run, Bradley noted. "We have to be able to respond and support them where they are," Bradley said, referring to enterprise customers spread across multicloud environments. "Where we can't or don't today, we can say, 'Hey, Boomi, you can come in and help support them maybe because they're on multicloud or hybrid.' The partnership with Boomi really allows us to support that." Boomi's architectural focus on a patented, cloud-native runtime -- one that can transact and transform data anywhere, including inside a customer's own firewall -- is now paying dividends in the agentic era. The same infrastructure underpinning Boomi's integration capabilities now supports domain-specific language model deployment and agent execution within sovereign environments -- a capability under active development through a European platform instance built in the U.K. to address data sovereignty requirements from financial institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, Maya explained. "If you think about what's the most valuable thing in an organization -- it's data, it's their data, it's how they create their competitive moat. That data is now being thrown all over the place," Maya said. "What Boomi is saying is, 'How can we use this beautiful architecture to serve customers who want to host their own small language model or domain-specific language model within their own VPN or their own firewall?' Our next-gen runtime is going to enable that to happen, and very soon we'll be able to offer the ability to run agents in those runtimes, too." The practical result of that control-first philosophy is visible in Boomi Connect, a recently released product that allows any user -- developer or business domain expert -- to build and connect agents using centrally managed credentials and access controls. The offering is based on governance by design, enabling the kind of fast, democratized agent building that shadow IT once enabled for cloud, but with the guardrails that enterprise risk teams actually require, according to Maya. "To have that comfort and security of unlocking your AI potential -- activating your data with AI -- you have to think about how can [you] control it," Maya said. "Going forward into the future, you're just letting it loose, but making sure you can control it." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2026:

Liquid data and shift to headless enterprise architecture - SiliconANGLE

The headless enterprise has arrived: theCUBE's Boomi World day two keynote analysis The enterprise is reaching an inflection point as AI agents move from experiment to operational reality, forcing a rethink of how data flows, governance gets built and platforms evolve to serve a headless future. At the center of that rethink is liquid data -- the fluid, low-latency movement of governed data between agents across the enterprise -- and the infrastructure required to make it work at scale. Day two of Boomi World 2026 brought that transition into focus, with Boomi LP shifting from presenting a strategic vision to focusing on product substance. As Boomi has steadily transitioned from its integration-platform-as-a-service roots into a full agentic enterprise platform, its positioning is arriving at exactly the moment AI and agents are colliding with the need for governed, enterprise-grade data infrastructure, according to John Furrier (pictured, right), co-founder and CEO of SiliconANGLE Media Inc. "What [Boomi has] built is a governed data-to-agent platform," Furrier said. "What that means is data and agents will talk natively, [with] very fast latency, and that's gonna happen very much across the entire enterprise. You have got to have the governed version of that, so they're building the governance into that paradigm." Furrier spoke with Gemma Allen (left) as part of a day two keynote analysis at Boomi World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed Boomi's headless enterprise strategy, the liquid data opportunity and the governance framework underpinning the company's agentic platform push. (* Disclosure below.) The day two product keynote underscored how the "headless enterprise" concept is becoming one of the defining architectural bets in enterprise software. Boomi's case is that the shift toward an agentic enterprise -- where AI agents dynamically interact with systems without traditional application interfaces -- demands a native governance layer baked into the platform itself, not bolted on after the fact, Furrier noted. The e-commerce playbook is a reference point -- Shopify's headless model gave merchants infrastructure without dictating the front end, but the presentation will likely be different for the enterprise. "In the enterprise, I look at 'headless' more as an interface to the end user. With AI, you're seeing user experience change with prompts ... so there's gonna be a diversity of [interaction] points," Furrier said. "From a personal standpoint, that's going to be tailored for every user." Demos of Boomi's Agent Control Tower made the human oversight layer tangible. The governance framework addresses a key concern heading into the headless era: the question as to what happens to human accountability when agents are running business processes at speed, Allen explained. The answer from Boomi's keynote was front and center -- kill switches and audit trails are built into the architecture, not optional add-ons. Now, Boomi's decade-long platform build -- from integration to automation to agentic infrastructure -- resembles a compounding investment converging with a market ready for it, according to Furrier. "It's not just the classic cliché of tech meets business," Furrier said. "It's really an absolute intersection." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2026:

Data activation in the age of agentic AI - SiliconANGLE

Boomi CEO: The agents are ready, but the enterprise data foundation beneath them might not be Somewhere inside every large company, there is a long list of AI pilots -- promising, applauded, then quietly shelved. The culprit, more often than not, is a data activation failure. The gap between AI ambition and enterprise reality is widening as organizations struggle with legacy systems and shadow AI building inside every business function. Boomi LP has positioned itself squarely in the center of that gap, framing data activation -- getting the right data to the right systems at machine speed -- as the unglamorous prerequisite that makes agentic AI viable in production, according to Boomi Chief Executive Officer Steve Lucas (pictured). "Last year we were talking about AI agents -- and honestly, the year before that as well," Lucas said. "This year, the agents aren't coming. They're here. AI is starting to become not just a pervasive conversation in the enterprise -- it is being deployed. It is real. We're starting to see real ROI coming from AI and agents in enterprise processes, integrations and automations." Lucas spoke with theCUBE's John Furrier and Gemma Allen at Boomi World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed data activation, AI governance, the future of the enterprise builder persona and Boomi's strategy for harnessing AI at scale. (* Disclosure below.) The path to AI readiness starts long before any model is selected. Fragmented data pipelines, mainframe dependencies and decades of legacy enterprise resource planning systems remain serious obstacles to the fluid, real-time data flows that agents require, Lucas noted. "You've got to get your arms around your data," he said. "'Where is it? Is it of quality? Can I deliver it in real time?' If you are struggling to deliver data to human intelligence in real time with quality, how do you think that's going to play out for AI that operates thousands of times faster?" But data readiness is only part of the equation -- the harder work is orchestrating agents as they develop skills over time and deploying them against specific, domain-validated workflows, Lucas explained. Real-world results are emerging: Lexitas, a Chronicle Bidco Inc. company, has automated nearly 50% of its highly regulated payment processing through AI agents on the Boomi platform, with zero human involvement and oversight flowing through Boomi's governance plane, he noted. A second customer, Multiquip Inc., has automated roughly 80% of technician support queries through agents, eliminating the need to manually search thousands of product manuals. Examples such as these point to a maturation curve moving faster than most expect. "The first thing that organizations want is domain-specific AI, not generalized AI. If I'm a healthcare organization, I want HIPAA-compliant, healthcare-specific, domain-specific AI. Number two [is] they want to understand, 'How does this plug into my business process?'" he said. "We're gonna go from generalized ROI to domain-specific ROI -- very quickly." To support containerized, model-agnostic deployment at scale, Boomi this week announced a strategic collaboration with Red Hat Inc. to deliver a single integrated stack for agentic AI -- pairing Boomi's Agentstudio with Red Hat AI so organizations can run open-weight models privately rather than exposing enterprise data to frontier model providers, Lucas explained. The logic is straightforward: Model choice is not a differentiator -- control is. "Which AI model is right for your company? The answer is all of them," he said. "If all of the models are the right answer, how do I harness those? How do I containerize them? Having that container with our runtime, with those models, now you can privatize AI, you can build your data geometry -- your graph that is unique to your company -- not help somebody else build their trillion-dollar company." Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of Boomi World 2026: