Boomi CEO Steve Lucas said that the number of AI agents will outnumber the number of people in your business in less than three years.

"The digital imperative is how do I work with agents? The number of agents will outnumber the number of humans in less than three years," said Lucas, speaking at Constellation Research's AI Forum in New York. "It will be overwhelming. It will be fast and we're not prepared."

Lucas said that he's challenging his CIO to rid Boomi of expense reports. It's 2024 and it's time to get together with AI and make sure humans never have to approve an expense report.

"The question everyone should be looking at is how can I augment every single business process that I have today with AI," said Lucas. "Try a process, and find a way AI can augment it and reduce human time consumption. No. 2 is how can you automate my business and eliminate the need for humans in specific areas."

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"The three year horizon is probably too conservative. If the trend continues that agents can be built by low code and no code tools and citizen developers. We will reach that point easily by end of 2025. The hunger for more automation powered by a nothing and also with AI is unstoppable. Give business users the tools and they will go fish."

Lucas said he wasn't talking about reducing jobs as much as redundancies. The big issue will be orchestrating agents, he added. In a nutshell, Lucas sees layers of agents all checking for hallucinations, accounting compliance and other issues.

Boomi is working on a registry to manage agents. "We are building what we call an Active Directory for agents, where you can register them, track them, understand the decisions, revoke authority, and do it in real time. If you don't have that doesn't matter what agents you invent. It doesn't matter what you do with AI. You have to have inside transparency, explainability, control," said Lucas.

"Under Steve Lucas' watch, Boomi has accelerated its pace of innovation and is now leading the way among integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors toward AI orchestration and the development of agentic applications," said Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen.

Other takeaways from Lucas' talk:

Data strategy and quality remains job one. Lucas said "the rule hasn't changed. It's garbage in, garbage out." Lucas said he's "amazed at how few companies are really prepared across the complex landscape of apps, databases, APIs and models that they don't know where the data comes from to feed these systems."

Boomi is feeding information into Llama 3 models internally. "We give it everything from all of our product, pricing and packaging data, which changes frequently," explained Lucas. "We feed it Slack channel information from all of our employee, customer success and support conversations. It knows everything. Why? A challenge I'd put in front of you is to build an agent that is better than any human in a role."

AI improvement. Lucas said his bet is that can get 10% incrementally better every year. "If AI gets just 10% better each year we may not reach artificial general intelligence, but we will get close," said Lucas. "Whether it is truly conscious or not won't matter, it will do most of our jobs better than we will as defined today. This is the AI Big Bang, the real version."

Will we be talking about AI a year from now? Lucas said the context of AI conversations will change, but the topic remains. "We are going to need agents, registries and protocols. We will need whole protocols for agents to define how they communicate so we humans can even understand what we're talking about. What does that stack look like from data all the way up to development. Agents will communicate at speeds we cannot even understand."

Business Research Themes

Data to Decisions, Future of Work

Roles

Chief Information Officer

Tags

#AI #artificialintelligence #machinelearning #ML #generativeAI