Data needs to be ready for AI — Boomi

By Cathy Rose A. Garcia, Editor-in-Chief

CHICAGO — Boomi, the data activation company, wants to help enterprises make their data ready for the artificial intelligence (AI) world.

“Only 7% of your organization’s data is AI ready today. AI-ready being things like contextual, consistent, etc. And these projects, they’re going to be abandoned unless you have your data activated and ready,” Steve Lucas, Boomi chairman and chief executive officer (CEO), said in a keynote speech during Boomi World here on May 13. “But we can help. We can do this together.”

Boomi currently moves twice the amount of data per second for its 30,000 customers than Visa does every day, he said.

“When I looked at that number, I realized we are way more about the journey for the data than the destination. At Boomi, our job is to help you move data, get information to the right place, to the right people, to the right agents… with quality and context,” Mr. Lucas said.

The Boomi CEO said data activation is critical to the success of any enterprise, as the data will be activated not just for human intelligence but for AI.

“We want to put you at the center of the center, that center of data. Automation, integration, and AI. And that’s what we’re focused on with Boomi as the data activation company,” Mr. Lucas said.

“Data is not the new oil… Data is simply sand. There are tons of it. Not all of it’s useful, but we can do amazing things with it. We can turn sand into chips, silicon. We can do these things with data, but it’s only if you put it to work. It’s only if you activate that data,” he said.

With all the hype about AI, Mr. Lucas emphasized that AI needs to translate into real return on investment (RoI).

“No matter how good AI is, if RoI doesn’t exist, it won’t matter. Who cares if it’s more creative… The RoI must exist for AI,” he said.

He noted that around 95% of AI projects miss RoI, because “it’s just too easy to start” with no planning and analysis.

“Our job is to find value in RoI. Our job is to not brag about numbers. Our job is to help you become the center of the universe where data, automation, integration, and AI, where they converge,” Mr. Lucas said.

In terms of RoI, he said they are looking at time savings and productivity boosts.

“Are we saving people time? Time equals capacity for our sellers, for our marketers, for our engineers…  I would say that we have solidly saved 100,000 or so hours per year at Boomi worth of productivity,” he said.

“We are still growing. What we’re realizing is that we can produce more products and support more customers with the same number of people that we have. So, if anything, I would say that productivity or all of this AI has led us to a greater ambition for our growth. That’s the RoI,” he added.

ENTERPRISE PLATFORM
Meanwhile, Boomi announced a major expansion of its enterprise platform to support modern, AI-driven environments.

At Boomi World, the company said it was adding new capabilities across orchestrated agentic workflows, agentic engineering, governed agent connectivity, grounded agent context, and localized agent infrastructure.

These innovations are expected to power the agentic enterprise, “where agents and humans work together to drive action and operationalize AI at scale,” it said.

“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. With these new innovations, we’re extending the Boomi Enterprise Platform to make that foundation a reality,” Ed Macosky, chief product and technology officer at Boomi, said.

With an acceleration in AI adoption, many enterprises are having problems in scaling beyond initial use cases because of fragmented systems and lack of operational infrastructure.

Boomi introduced new innovations to address these issues faced by enterprises.

Boomi Connect provides secure, governed connectivity between AI tools and enterprise applications through model context protocol (MCP)-enabled tools, while Boomi AI Gateway enables built-in policy enforcement, cost controls, and observability.

The MCP Registry allows enterprises to scale AI with control and manage MCP servers across Boomi.

Boomi Orchestrate allows customers to turn business ideas into enterprise-grade agentic workflows, while Agent SIM lets organizations simulate and validate agent behavior before deployment.

Boomi Companion is touted to accelerate agentic engineering on the Boomi platform. It is a collection of open-source agent skills that allow developers to design, build, test, deploy, and diagnose integrations through natural language using AI tools that they prefer.

With Agentstudio, developers can invoke Boomi agents from any architecture or pipeline, while non-technical users can securely surface them within custom apps and portals.

Boomi Knowledge Hub provides a single, unified context layer to ensure AI agents and people always work from trusted, up-to-date information.

Boomi Meta Hub grounds AI agents and people in expert-endorsed business definitions that improve agent accuracy, eliminate fragmented interpretations, and ensure consistent business logic at scale.

Distributed Agent Runtime reduces cloud latency and controls costs by deploying agents on-premises while keeping sensitive data behind the firewall.

Agentstudio Multi-region Instances allow enterprises to scale agents globally by leaving agent metadata and runtime execution in specified regions.

“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. With more than 30,000 customers and AI guided by hundreds of millions of integrations, we’re helping organizations move from connected and automated to fully agentic, and turn AI into real operational impact,” Mr. Lucas said.

Boomi recently received several analyst recognitions, such as being named a Leader for a 12^th straight year and positioned highest for Ability to Execute in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS).

It was also named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide API Management 2026 Vendor Assessment, and included in the 2026 Constellation ShortList for Cross-Platform Agentic AI, the 2026 Constellation ShortList for Data Integration and Transformation for Cloud-Based Analytical Data Platforms, and the 2026 Constellation ShortList for IPaaS.

Boomi was also named a Leader in the Nucleus Research iPaaS Technology Value Matrix 2026.

“We believe this wave of analyst recognition reflects the strength of our platform and the momentum we’re seeing from customers who want one strategic foundation for integration, APIs, data, automation, and agentic AI,” Mr. Lucas said.