Boomi CEO Lucas On AI Agent Era: ‘You Will Fail’ Without Governance

‘If software can change its mind—especially in the very business processes that we rely on for things like banking, finance, health care, you name it—then, isn’t the most important thing ensuring that humans are in the loop and we’re monitoring and governing AI?’ Boomi CEO Steve Lucas tells CRN.

Boomi CEO Steve Lucas believes that solution providers fielding customer excitement around the opportunities with artificial intelligence agents need to also educate users on the importance of plans for monitoring, supervising and governing those agents.

“If you don’t have that plan, you will fail,” Lucas told CRN in an interview. “For the past 40, probably 50 years of technology automation, we have relied on code and processes that are deterministic. If this happens, do that. … We’re about to enter a world where we’re going to move from deterministic processes to agentic processes—software can change its mind.”

He’s positioning the Conshohocken, Pa.-based integration and automation platform provider as a premier vendor for AI governance, revealing this week during Boomi World 2025 new Boomi capabilities around agent life-cycle management and deeper integration with Amazon and Salesforce.

Boomi holds the conference in Dallas through Thursday.

[RELATED: Solution Providers Prepare For 2025’s AI Agent Era]

Boomi World 2025

SP Singh, senior vice president of enterprise applications and integration services at India-based Boomi partner Infosys and a speaker at Boomi World 2025, told CRN in an interview that Boomi’s acquisitions last year of Rivery, Mashery and Apiida’s federated API management business and API management assets—the latter two from acquisitions from Citrix and Tibco parent Cloud Software Group—have positioned Boomi well for the era of building AI agents.

“One of the fundamentals that people are looking at in terms of getting ready for their AI and agentic journey is to get their foundation ready, get their foundation into a modernized situation and have their data ready,” Singh said. “That’s where most of the traction is. And Boomi fits in quite nicely there.

Boomi has about 800 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.

When asked about the uncertain economy amid global tariffs affecting AI sales, Lucas told CRN that from his view businesses are prioritizing AI investments over other areas of technology.

“If your pitch or conversation doesn’t start with AI and end with AI—it can have anything you want in the middle,” he said. “But if you’re not bookending it with AI, you’re not going to get the money.”

The economy has also not hurt Boomi itself, he said, with the vendor expected to exceed $1 billion in recurring revenue late next year. He also has plans for about five acquisitions this year, following up on three the vendor made in 2024 to boost capabilities in areas including API management.

Here’s more of what Lucas had to say to CRN about Boomi’s latest updates and his book published in April, “Digital Impact: The Human Element of AI-Driven Transformation.”

What are the opportunities you want Boomi partners excited about looking ahead?

We’re in the era of AI-driven automation.

For the past 40, probably 50 years of technology automation, we have relied on code and processes that are deterministic. If this happens, do that.

We’re about to enter a world where we’re going to move from deterministic processes to agentic processes—software can change its mind.

If software can change its mind—especially in the very business processes that we rely on for things like banking, finance, health care, you name it—then, isn’t the most important thing ensuring that humans are in the loop and we’re monitoring and governing AI?

You can only really proceed at the pace of trust. That’s it. And if you don’t trust AI to make the right decisions in finance, in health care, then you’re not going to succeed.

We can’t ignore the well-established rules of garbage in, garbage out … just because it’s AI. We can’t ignore the well-established rules of trust.

What we want all of our partners to know is Boomi has launched the world’s first and currently only high-scale AI governance platform. That’s what we’re making generally available at Boomi World.

We have over 30,000 AI agents … deployed in our customer base today. So we get managing agents at scale more so than any other company.

Our agent governance platform, fully integrated with Amazon’s Bedrock—their agent-building platform—is truly unique in the market.

As excited as we all are about AI and specifically the agentic world and the era of AI-driven automation, if we don’t start by asking our customers, ‘Hey, what’s your agent governance platform? What’s your plan? How are you going to monitor, control, supervise, govern?’ If you don’t have that plan, you will fail.

How does Boomi fit into the competitive landscape of AI vendors?

This is the biggest pie that any of us have ever seen in technology in the past at least 30 years that I’ve been in tech.

Talking about tens of trillions of dollars up for grabs. Not millions, not billions, not hundreds of billions, and not even trillions.

This is the biggest transformation ever in technology. And, and I’m talking framing the internet and mobile and cloud—those will pale [in comparison].

There’s plenty of room for everybody. It’s why we partnered up with Amazon specifically.

Bedrock is amazing. I can build any agent I want. But if I’m building agents in finance or health care, and you can’t supervise, govern and control, even Amazon with all its might won’t win.

The first question any partner should ask any customer is, ‘What’s your AI governance plan for agents?’

No. 2 is, ‘How are you going to leverage all the infrastructure investments that you’ve made to date to supercharge your agent strategy?’

Our argument at Boomi is the fuel for AI agents—apps, data, APIs—that’s the fuel. Boomi seamlessly connects apps, data and APIs.

We supercharge agents by giving them the fuel that they need to be most effective in your organization.

I can supervise, govern and manage. Create trust. Create transparency. This, to me, is the killer combo. It’s not one or the other.

How will Boomi continue to innovate in the AI era?

How many humans are going to lose their job to AI? That’s the topic. Everybody wants to talk about that because it’s scary.

I don’t believe that humans are really going to lose their jobs to AI. Humans will lose their jobs to humans that are extraordinarily good with AI. That’s who I think they'll lose their jobs to.

Like any revolution—the Industrial Revolution, the manufacturing revolution, the technology revolution, the internet revolution—do jobs change? Absolutely.

Jobs evolve. I’m pretty sure farmers were freaking out during the agricultural revolution, but we’re fine and farmers are fine. And jobs will evolve.

What we want Boomi users, our customers, to know is how do we make humans superhuman with AI. I honestly feel superhuman in that I can operate not because I’m smart, but thanks to ChatGPT and a Ph.D.-level of expertise on topics I generally know nothing about.

Am I not superhuman with that capability, my ability to take incredibly complex things, distill them down to salient points, gain insight that I otherwise would not have gained or would have taken me weeks or months, years?

How do we tackle the complexity—the soul-crushing complexity that exists in businesses today—with AI? The average business today has over 360 cloud applications alone. The average enterprise today has over 1,000 databases alone.

You’d think after 50 years of tech, we would have solved silly little things like, ‘Hey, give me better analytics.’

[But] we're still struggling. I still show up to meetings … and somebody’s like, ‘God, I don’t know if we have the right data for this.’ Oh my gosh. You’ve got to be kidding me. It is 2025.

[With] Boomi to get your arms around your data, your apps, your API, to build these amazing agents to give organizations insight, we will be able to solve problems at a superhuman level. That’s the message.

How is economic uncertainty affecting customer buying behavior?

If your pitch or conversation doesn’t start with AI and end with AI—it can have anything you want in the middle. But if you’re not bookending it with AI, you’re not going to get the money.

Every CIO, every CEO … they’re asking [when it comes to a] major technology investment, ‘Is it forwarding our AI agenda?’

What we'’e seeing is a massive shift from, ‘Hey, I have got to connect my stuff to build a process’- to, ‘I have to transform my organization into an AI-first company. How does your technology help me forward that agenda?’

That’s the question that’s being asked, and everybody’s got to be prepared to answer.

Boomi’s growth is better than ever. We think we’re going to [exceed] $1 billion in recurring revenue probably late next year.

This is a company that, a few years ago, we were like $300 [million], $400 million. Our growth has hit that end of the hockey stick, that exponential curve.

As much as I’d like to claim that’s all me, it’s really the market that we’re in. Everybody needs apps, data, APIs to supercharge AI agents. And that’s what we do.

Will we see acquisitions by Boomi or more so organic innovation?

Both. We have ramped up our M&A activity aggressively. Last year, we made three key acquisitions.

The core enemy is, obviously, complexity, all the apps and the databases. But it’s also fragmentation in the technology market.

How many database vendors are in the market? I [don’t] know. How many API management companies are in the market? I [don’t] know.

We enable our customers to get their arms around everything they have got. All the APIs and the zombie APIs they don’t even know about that are just roaming out in the fields.

It’s highly likely this year that we’ll make at least four or five acquisitions. So we are hyperaggressive in the M&A market.

Be the prey or be the predator. And we choose the latter.

What are the big growth markets for Boomi?

I’d say a massive amount of our growth is coming out of Europe. For us, expanding in Europe makes a ton of sense.

We have about 25 percent of our revenue now that comes from there. Two years ago, it was 10 [percent], 15 [percent].

Technology areas, if you are going to be successful in AI, there are key areas like data catalog, enterprise metadata. These things matter.

Let’s say that I’m talking to some brilliant AI agent, and I say, ‘Hey, what’s my forecast?’

The agent has to know what do I mean? Sales forecast, retention forecast, product pipeline forecast?

There’s context that you need to give it. Then the second thing is, where’s the forecast? Let’s assume I mean sales. Do you mean top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel? Is it retention?

Where is that data? Is it Salesforce? Is it Clari? Is it NetSuite?

Context matters with AI agents. So there’s this whole ontology map that needs to be built out for organizations.

For us, those areas are super critical. You’re going to see us make a lot of investment there.

What do you want partners to know about your new book, ‘Digital Impact: The Human Element of AI-Driven Transformation’?

We are so heavily rotated on what AI will take away from us that we forget software and AI.

Software exists to benefit humans. And we’ve lost the plot there.

Does anyone wake up in the morning and think, ‘Oh, man, I’m excited to go approve that expense report?’ No. It’s soul-crushing work. Logging into systems, clicking on approvals.

[Software] exists to benefit us. We’ve got to use AI to take back the narrative.

Let's actually use it to get more time back to be creative, to get more time back to help each other as humans.

[The book shares] stories about amazing organizations that are doing amazing things. The American Cancer Society—using data, using technology, using AI—to bring life-saving treatment to people that need it the most.

It’s not, ‘Let me get into this ridiculous detail about some complicated data platform, blah, blah, blah.’ That’s not it. Today, the average person over 70 that’s getting life-saving cancer treatment, the No. 1 thing that stops them from getting that treatment is getting a ride to the hospital.

They’re not going to open their phone and use Uber. … But you can use technology to find friends that can give them rides, to find ride facilities, people that are willing to donate those rides.

Using technology, using data, using AI to bring that together—those are beautiful, simple, elegant solutions that are there today that can save lives. Let’s not lose the plot in all of this.

Did you use AI to write the book?

Very little, actually.

I asked AI to give me feedback on the book, which was kind of interesting. Ask me questions. What am I missing? But what I found in writing a book about the human element of AI is that the human still matters.

[Compared with his previous book, 2018’s ‘Engage to Win: A Blueprint for Success in the Engagement Economy’), it was a bit faster [to write].

You can leverage AI to ask you, like I said, lots of hard questions.

This one, I spent more time asking people about their stories because it is the human element. That was fun.