Boomi CEO Lucas: Beware your zombie AI agents

Boomi CEO Steve Lucas said there are plenty of real returns from AI agents, but companies will need to get serious about costs and the "zombie agents running in your organization."

Speaking at Constellation Research's Connected Enterprise 2026, Lucas followed up on what was said at AI Forum about Boomi's Anthropic bill.

Lucas said Boomi has created hundreds of AI agents and the company leverages Anthropic models. "Everybody gets really excited and builds agents. Then those agents run every day, multiple times a day and my Anthropic bill goes up 10x," said Lucas. "I've got all of these zombie agents and I don't know how much my bill is and what it's going to be next month," said Lucas.

He continued:

"The big concern is we are not getting ROI from AI. Come on, everybody's getting ROI out of AI. We're shortening the complexity cycle. We're moving faster. We're innovating like never before. It does give your employees superpowers. We do need to get into hard ROI and outcomes. But I would actually be just as concerned about the zombie agents running in your organization. I'd be very concerned about the AI that shouldn't be accessing a data source."

Lucas said governance and integration matter and it'll matter a lot more when autonomous lines of business are created.

"Are we integration automation, which is what we've been telling ourselves we are for 20 years, or could we be autonomous data management? Could we deliver autonomous IT capabilities and with safety? I believe that what you're going to see next year is these really sophisticated harnesses, not just kind of like baby harness that can create an autonomous line of business, go way beyond.

We'll make sure your coding's accurate. We'll make sure that you know your revenue is in place. We'll make sure that your payments are on time. We make sure you're getting what you build. Security is the default. One must have that sophisticated harness that runs on a fairly advanced model that understands that line of business. The second is you have to have a roadmap to your data."

In other words, Boomi is blending AI agent governance, data, process and a roadmap to run your business.

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On other topics:

• The real gap is enterprise infrastructure, not intelligence. He called himself an "AI protagonist" but said companies can't yet manage what they're deploying. "We just lack the infrastructure at all in the enterprise to govern these things, these agents, manage them, track them, control them, secure them, feed them the right data," said Lucas.
• Ungoverned connections to data are dangerous. He warned against employees building their own unmanaged connectors (for example, through MCP, a protocol for linking AI tools to data). His alternatives are an agent control tower that registers agents from more than 30 platforms, plus a gateway that controls what agents can do.
• CEOs need to think about autonomous lines of business. Lucas compared the shift from level 2 to level 5 self-driving.
• Regulate the people using AI not the technology. "No regulation, which feels like where we are right now, is not terrific. We need to regulate the humans around it. We need to require some level of disclosure," said Lucas.
• Open weight models are critical. "I think we've seen the last of these very advanced AI companies giving us their best models." "Don't give away the herbs and spices. Use open weight models. Protect your data. It is your moat," said Lucas.