For Pega CTO Don Schuerman, agentic AI isn’t just about speeding up workflows — it’s potentially about rethinking them entirely. Speaking with media and analysts shortly before the Pegaworld conference in Las Vegas kicked off Monday Australian time he said that there is a real opportunity for agentic AI to harness what are sometimes seen as its weaknesses, its unpredictability.

“But if I treat it as a creative partner—ask it to show me how a workflow could be different, to give me four suggestions for how it could be better—that unpredictability becomes a strength.”

He suggested Pega has developed tools to implement technology in a way that accelerates things — “faster than people have seen before”

Agentic AI isn’t so much dominating technology conversations in the US at the moment, as monopolising them. But trying to differentiate the unique proposition of any one vendor can prove challenging

Schuerman said , “We have proven expertise as a decisioning network for orchestration—that’s what we do. I don’t know of any other organisations that combine the power of AI-based decisioning with the richness of that decision model.”

As a proof point, he offered the example of work it does with Verizon: “We make billions of decisions every day that influence how they engage with their customers. We also provide a workflow orchestration platform that drives hundreds of millions of cases from mission-critical processes across our clients. That’s foundational to our core.”

And that he said, is the firm’s unique capability. “What we’re able to drive with Agent tech is the ability to implement that technology in a way that accelerates things—faster than people have seen before. One of the challenges with tasks or workflow is that it can be really powerful, but it often takes time to get the workflow right.”

One of the challenges with tasks or workflows is that, while they can be really powerful, it often takes time and a lot of agreement within and across teams to get them right, he said. “But we can accelerate that significantly right now.

The other distinction he leaned into was the well-documented ability of agents who write code.

“Another key distinction on the agent side is this—there’s a lot of talk about agents that write code or one-time-use agents, like customer service bots or chatbots. But outside of what we’re doing, I’m not hearing many people talk about agents as tools to redesign your business—tools that help you actually rethink what your workflows should look like.”

Schuerman asked, “What do your customer experiences need to look like? When I work with clients, the challenge I constantly run into is the natural tendency to repave the cow path—to simply re-implement a process that’s essentially the same as what’s already in place.”

To help its customers achieve these goals, the company announced the expansion of its enhanced Pega Blueprint capabilities at the PegaWorld conference. The enhancements are designed to facilitate the creation of modern, cloud-native applications from legacy system assets, leveraging agentic AI to streamline the process.

The new features of Pega Blueprint allow organisations to ingest, analyse, and convert various legacy assets, including videos, documentation, UI screens, technical files, and source code, into modern applications. This development aims to shorten the system analysis phase and create a reimagined application blueprint ready for cloud deployment.

Kerim Akgonul, chief product officer at Pega, said, "Legacy systems are holding organisations back from delivering the experiences customers expect and the operational efficiency needed to stay competitive," he said.

In particular, Pega execs are honing in on the issue of technology debt - those older, legacy systems that often hold innovation back.

Pega said its research highlights that 88% of global IT decision-makers acknowledge that technical debt affects their ability to compete with more agile competitors. Traditional approaches to legacy modernisation are often time-consuming, requiring months of manual discovery and analysis. The new capabilities of Pega Blueprint aim to address these challenges by enabling the upload of various legacy inputs, such as documents, code analysis files, app screenshots, and videos, to design an optimised application starting point.

Akgonul said, "With these expanded Pega Blueprint capabilities, we're enabling organisations to speed up their transformation journey by extracting maximum value from existing documentation, code, or most any source available. This isn't just about lifting and shifting to the cloud – it's about reimagining workflows to create truly modern, efficient applications that drive business value."

The expanded capabilities are now available to all users, marking a significant step in Pega's offerings as The Enterprise Transformation Company, known for its enterprise AI decision-making and workflow automation solutions.

ANZ Bank started using Blueprint six months ago, says Andrew Calyvopoulos, Product Area lead, who is at the tail end of a 3 years project to migrate the bank's Pega apps to the cloud.

"We'd bring the business in. We'd ask them for their requirements. They did their best to articulate what they knew, and the technology teams did their best to interpret and capture that. And then it was good luck trying to deliver. "

Speaking in a breakout session at the conference, he said, "But by using Blueprint, we can build as we go and give them a prototype, which lets them say, 'Actually, that's in the wrong spot,' or 'That's in the wrong order.'"

According to Calyvopoulos, the feedback from the business is that Blueprint is amazing, "and it made a real difference, significantly reducing the time to value."

Strategic advantage

Sadagopan S, executive vice president and global head of SaaS and commercial applications, digital business services at HCLTech, remarked on the strategic advantage provided by Pega Blueprint. "As organisations grapple with the burden of legacy systems hindering their journey toward autonomous enterprises, Pega Blueprint, combined with our AI-powered framework, enables enterprises to leap directly from outdated architectures to intelligent, agentic systems that deliver exceptional Total Experience," he said.

He also added, "We're committed to leveraging Pega Blueprint's capabilities to help organisations eliminate tech debt, accelerate legacy transformation, and truly achieve autonomous operations."

Additional reporting by Andrew Birmingham