COVER STORY/ STEVE LUCAS
“The most valuable thing you can feed AI is not user interaction. It’s trusted data.”
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also making it breathe. To Lucas, this requires three essential factors that every modern enterprise must balance: 1. Integration: Connecting systems, applications, data- bases, and APIs so the organization can communicate. 2. Automation: Using data products and workflows to deliver information exactly where it’s needed without human intervention. 3. Agentification: Preparing for a world where the primary customer is no longer a human being, but an AI agent that consumes, interprets, and acts on the hu- man’s behalf. “You must have all three,” Lucas warns. “Right now, I see every company moving so quickly to change, evolve, and adapt to AI so they don’t fall behind. But, getting it right is so critical right now. I worry that the pressure to move quickly is going to cause many com- panies to fail in this area because they aren’t cleans- ing, automating, and making their data agent-ready simultaneously.” The AI Reality Check Indeed, there is a lot of hype surrounding AI. However, Lucas offers a stark reality check grounded in his own experience as a CEO. When he challenged his own teams at Boomi to deploy AI agents in accounting, le- gal, and HR, the roadblock wasn’t the technology—it was the data. “The world will not succeed with AI until we feed agents quality information,” he says. While humans back in the Business Intelligence era could look at a dashboard and instinctively know a number looked off, agents lack that gut feeling. They only read, interpret, and act. Therefore, if the data is bad, then AI can pro- duce bad results at an exponential scale.
n the quiet moments between the rhythmic beeping of a reversing construction truck—a humble re- minder of the digital plumbing that underpins our modern world—Steve Lucas, CEO of Boomi, is thinking about Isaac Newton. Specifically, he’s thinking about inertia.
“Objects at rest stay at rest and objects in motion stay in motion,” the Boomi CEO says, leaning into the conversation with SAPinsider. “Businesses that fail to act tend to stay at rest, and they end up being left be- hind. Businesses in motion tend to succeed. And how those businesses stay active, how they stay in motion, is through their data.” As we sit at the beginning of 2026, the stakes around this motion have never been higher. For SAP custom- ers, a window for completing foundational change is no longer a distant speck on the horizon; it is a giant, looming reality. In this backdrop, Lucas is evangelizing a philosophy he calls Data Activation. A New Era of Integration For decades, integration was the unsung hero of the enterprise world—the invisible pipes that moved a record from Salesforce to SAP and back again. But ac- cording to Lucas, that era is dead. Today, integration has transitioned from a back-office necessity to a core strategic asset. “The most valuable thing you can feed AI is not user interaction,” Lucas explains. “It’s trusted data. It’s get- ting critical information to those AI systems so that they create insight and discover new pathways.” This shift defines what Lucas calls “the Data Activa- tion era.” The shift not only involves moving data but
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