What you need to know

• Steve Lucas, CEO and Chairman of US software firm Boomi, has initiated an ambitious AI-driven transformation, mandating all customer interactions and 50 per cent of business processes are to be enhanced or augmented by AI agents in an all-hands memo dispatched 12 days ago.

• Lucas warns businesses about the disruptive potential of AI, likening the risks to "a thousand Blockbusters" and highlights the scale of Walmart's AI investment as a cautionary tale for retailers.

• Boomi is also actively integrating AI agents into its workflows and Lucas advises executives to inventory their company's knowledge processes, identify areas for AI integration within the next 12-18 months, and establish a mandate to begin this transition.

• Boomi's CMO, Alison Biggan, emphasises the practicality of Boomi's AI solutions, noting over 3000 customers have adopted their AI agents to streamline operations.

• Biggan said Boomi employs its own agents, plus third-party AI tools such as Drift and Regie, to enhance customer interactions, reduce support burdens, and accelerate sales cycles. It's resulted in a 41-day reduction in deal cycles and a 47 per cent increase in prospect-to-lead conversion rates.

• AI agents are revolutionising Boomi's marketing processes, enabling enhanced demand generation through automation, faster content creation and improved SEO.

• To compete with industry giants, businesses need to work out how to deploy AI agents and develop agent governance, the Boomi execs warn.

Twelve days ago, Steve Lucas, the CEO and Chair of US software firm Boomi, shared a one-page memo with his leadership team. Lucas, known to many Australian CMOs from his stint as the CEO of martech firm Marketo, outlined nothing short of a revolution for the firm, one he expects to drive aggressively over the next 12 months.

"My mandate was 100 per cent of all customer interactions are enhanced or augmented by AI, number one. Secondly, that half of all business processes are enhanced or augmented by AI," he says.

If that sounds ambitious, consider this: Lucas told Mi3 at the ServiceNow sales kickoff he attended earlier in January this year, that staff of that business were told ServiceNow plans to build an agent for every single business process on the planet.

"These are pretty grand ambitions," says Lucas, who warns marketers and other company leaders the alternative is to be steamrolled by giant incumbent businesses who will bring their huge scale to bear and roll up whole markets.

"Blockbuster is everyone's cautionary tale," he says. "But there will be a thousand Blockbusters in the AI era."

Of course, the tech industry thrives on FUD—fear, uncertainty, and doubt—and Lucas' warning projects similar overtones. Can he be more specific?

"Walmart is the cautionary tale for retailers, right? How was Walmart so disruptive? The retailer created economies of scale and hyper-efficiency, and drove down costs to the point where no one else could compete," he responds. "We're talking about a road that is littered with mom-and-pop shops and mid-sized retailers that just don't even exist anymore. We could go through and name a thousand of them.

"Walmart has a multi-billion dollar AI budget. So what's going to happen to the remaining retailers? Walmart can deploy a fleet of AI buyers that buy products, that can opt-out, and that are optimised for high sales and low prices on the shelves. It doesn't have to employ 1000s of corporate buyers anymore, the costs go down."

That means fewer and less retailers will be able to compete with them, Lucas says. "There's going to be a deeper canyon of haves and have-nots and businesses, the ones that invested for either knowledge or insight or margin or profit, and the ones that didn't."

That's where Lucas spots an opportunity for Boomi, which apart from selling agents to its clients has already begun the process of introducing agents into its own workflows. According to the Boomi chief, if you want to compete with the Walmarts of the world, or whatever Walmart-equivalent dominates your industry, you will need to deploy agents and you will need to develop robust agent governance.

Vendor, heal thyself

Lucas is already driving the agent transformation within Boomi, a private software business owned by private equity companies that was valued at $US4bn at the time of the 2021 acquisition. It reportedly had revenues of around $500M in 2024. Irrespective of whether you buy his Boomi sale pitch or not, he has something few Australian executives can boast - experience implementing AI agents at scale across a global enterprise.

What advice can he offer to other executives? The first question to ask yourself, he says, is: "Do we as a company have a strong inventory of all of our knowledge processes? For example, do you know how your income statement for your company is assembled? This is a knowledge process."

Lucas also stresses knowledge processes are different to manufacturing processes. "Knowledge process includes things like the reports that we look at, the dashboards  we look at, the analytics, the income statements, the balance sheets. How are those things produced? What is the process for those, as well as all of your core other business processes?"

Next, you need to understand what parts of those processes today or in the next 12 to 18 months, can be outsourced to AI , "...and at what level."

"Thirdly, have you provided a mandate for your business to begin the process of moving, or to begin moving parts of those processes to AI?" Lucas asks.  

This is where the one-page memo for the leadership team came into the conversation—a plan that has also been shared with the whole company now.

Customer Outreach

Boomi's CMO Alison Biggan has the job of turning that internal and external expertise in AI agents into revenue for Boomi. In the same way the explosion in APIs led to what she calls API-sprawl, Biggan believes the risk of ungovernable AI agent sprawl is exercising the mind of customers, more than 3000 of whom have already deployed one of the six agents Boomi has made available to them through its platform.

"The biggest thing our customers have told us recently, and you can see this in terms of the adoption of our agents, is that the core differentiator for us is we have always had AI integrated into the Boomi platform, and that what we're delivering to customers, as it relates to agents and AI, is very practical, concrete, usable solutions. We are not talking edge cases," she explains.

Like Lucas, Biggan has already experienced the transformation potential of agents in Boomi's marketing department. "Some of these are Boomi agents, some of them are from third parties."

One of those third-party agents is called Drift and was provided by a company called Salesloft. It's parsing the most relevant information from conversational text with the customer and streamlines the response.

According to Tim Ozmina, Boomi's Head of Demand Generation and Marketing Ops, "With decision trees [which powered earlier chatbots], you can steer the conversation exactly how you want. It’s awesome for a business, but it’s not as good for a site visitor.

"What if they have a question or want to find something that isn’t in the decision tree playbook? It’s nearly impossible to understand and plan for every single situation on the website from all the different industries, personas, and buyer stages."

The company says one of the effects of the new generation of bots was fewer meetings were needed with clients, and those meetings were also of higher quality.

"Since we had the Bionic Chatbot look up all of our help docs, it can answer support questions and give customers a step-by-step response. A Sales Development Rep isn’t going to know that information off the top of their head and be able to answer it in two seconds — but the bot can," Ozmina says.

In addition to deflecting 60 per cent of support conversations away from its SDR team, quarter over quarter, Boomi's deal-making accelerated with a 41-day decrease in the average deal cycle, normally a notoriously long exercise in B2B sales. That was off the back of a 47 per cent increase in prospect-to-marketing qualified lead conversion rate.

Boomi also uses another third-party agent called Regie which writes the multi-touch sales sequences the sales reps can then use, Biggan tells Mi3. "It allows them [to be quicker], but and also incredibly relevant [for customers.]"

Biggan says agents are now core to the demand generation cycle managed by the marketing team. And of course, she says, the other big area of improvement in marketing is content generation.

"It's not just about creating a piece of content. I can take a webinar, get a transcription of the webinar, I can get a white paper, social posts, updated messaging, and do AB testing. These are all things that historically would take a long time and [need] a lot of manpower.  We can just do that incredibly [quickly] because of the power of it," he says.

Then there are the SEO benefits. "The core to good SEO is content, and the AI creates and scales relevant content and can test content. That will continue to change the game," Biggan adds.