COVER STORY/ STEVE LUCAS
“One single person
or agent with the wrong idea in an IT department can break every bit of sovereign effort you’ve made to comply with data laws.”
Human Value at the Speed of Agentic Automation
grounded in the human element. He points to a mantra that has guided him for decades: “Change only happens at the speed of trust,” he says. Lucas notes that some AI pioneers have forgot- ten that humans must trust technology before they will embrace it. He believes that when AI halluci- nates, “trust is lost in buckets” and this is why the job of the CIO is being redefined. “The CIO must become the Chief AI Officer,” Lucas asserts. They can be compared to the con- ductors of a symphony, the neutral partners who must evaluate which instruments, in this case, which models and agents, actually create the best outcome for the organization. The Autonomous Enterprise As we get close to ending our conversation, Lucas looks past 2026. If the current era is about Data Activation, he believes that the next frontier is the Autonomous Enterprise. Lucas draws a parallel to the first time he en- gaged the self-driving feature in a car to emphasize his point. “It was pretty scary... taking your hands off the wheel at 65 miles an hour,” he admits. “But as the technology evolved, it learned to handle stop signs, right turns, and eventually, the com- plexities of a left turn that crosses traffic.” He adds, “Your enterprise will evolve the same way. We are building the digital fabric that enables any organization to create as much of a self-driving or Autonomous Enterprise as they want.” His vision for the Autonomous Enterprise is bold: an enterprise that can navigate the high- way of global commerce at high speed, handling routine maneuvers autonomously, while leav- ing the high-level strategy to the humans in the driver’s seat.
According to Lucas, one of the most compelling examples of Data Activation in action involves a customer navigating a fragmented, heterogene- ous environment. This organization utilized SAP Concur for expenses and NetSuite for financial re- cords. While both were excellent systems, integrat- ing them required a lot of manual labor. The finance team was losing thousands of hours to what Lucas describes as “the soul-crushing rec- onciliation work of just manually going through and looking at expenses to finance and financial record entries.” Using Boomi’s platform, the organization built a single AI agent in just a few days. This agent was designed to: 1. Connect the data silos between SAP Concur and NetSuite. 2. Execute the financial reconciliation process autonomously. 3. Turn static expense records into active, recon- ciled financial data without human intervention. Lucas noted that, upon implementation, the CFO reported savings of 10,000+ hours per year for the finance team. Moreover, by automating the mundane, the team was freed to perform higher- value work, shifting from manual data entry and reconciliation to strategic financial analysis. Lucas added that this case serves as a blueprint for igniting decades-old processes with new agen- tic capabilities without needing to replace the un- derlying core systems. Speed of Trust Despite the talk of multi-agent systems and millions of actions per second, Lucas remains
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