Boomi highlights business thought leaders, the trends they see, and the interesting things their organizations are doing. We especially focus on their views about the rapid advances in AI.
As Guru CEO Rick Nucci stood on stage in mid-May to announce a partnership with Boomi, he described it as an ideal alliance between two fast-growing tech companies at the forefront of innovation in the AI era.
“It’s the perfect fit of complementary technologies,” Nucci said at Boomi World 2026. “We talk about Guru being the knowledge foundation. Boomi is the data foundation. The things we’re going to do together in helping customers with AI transformation will be awesome.”
But it was also a deeply personal, full-circle moment for the man who founded Boomi 26 years ago. Nucci guided the startup from humble beginnings – an office above a suburban Philadelphia pizza parlor – with a paradigm-shifting epiphany. His vision of creating the world’s first cloud integration company permanently rewrote the B2B software playbook. Today, he’s watching Boomi’s role expand, powering the agentic enterprise.
Nucci couldn’t help but feel like a proud father as he looked out over the packed conference hall.
“It’s a little bit like coming home,” he said later. “I’m not going to over-credit myself. The nice thing about being a founder is that it’s a permanent title you always get to keep. I know an exponential amount of innovation has come long after I left. But it’s nice to know that I made a mark and helped set up the business to do so many amazing things.”
We caught up with Nucci after his appearance to hear the origin story of cloud integration, the thinking behind Guru, and why he refuses to buy into the AI “sky-is-falling” narrative. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
What is your backstory with cloud integration?
Rick Nucci: Boomi started in March of 2000. It was a rough market because there were 100 enterprise application integration vendors, all super well-funded. Microsoft launched BizTalk, and I thought, “Well, that sounds an awful lot like us, and I really don’t want to be competing with Microsoft.” So in 2006 at JavaOne, I’m sitting in a session, and the speaker is talking about building databases small enough that they can run on memory sticks. That was the spark. The idea of portable databases got my brain thinking that if this SaaS thing takes off, integration’s going to have to work completely differently. I literally walked back to my hotel room and just started drawing this thing out. I sat down with Mitch (Mitchell Stewart), who’s my Guru co-founder and at the time was running Boomi engineering, and Dennis McCarty, who’s still at Boomi. Mitch’s immediate response was, “I want to build this!” It would be a SaaS-based, cloud-managed way to design integrations, deploy them with a click of a button, and have the runtime keep itself up to date. I brought this back to Boomi’s CEO at the time, Bob Moul, who was also thinking a lot about cloud integration. We decided right then, “We’re burning the ships. We’re rebuilding and replatforming the entire architecture to do this.”
And the rest is history.
Rick Nucci: Boomi has played a meaningful role in cloud transformation. I feel really thrilled, happy, and inspired to see how the team has just blown this thing up. It’s gotten way bigger than I ever thought it would. I thought it had a ceiling. But it’s just hard to imagine something getting as big as Boomi has.
Now tell us more about Guru.
Rick Nucci: Absolutely. LLMs (large language models) are wonderfully brilliant. But they know nothing about our companies, our products, our people, our expertise, and the general know-how of the business. This information is scattered across so many different systems. It’s your document repositories. It’s your conversations happening in Slack or Teams. It’s your knowledge bases, etc. Guru exists to solve that problem. We create the verified layer of knowledge for your entire business. Every company has two audiences for this knowledge. We have employees who need it to do their work. And more and more, we have agents that need to act on this information. That’s what we solve, and now, Boomi’s going to make it even better.
How will Guru and Boomi work together?
Rick Nucci: Two things are playing out. One, AI models are amazing, and building an agent in 10 minutes is easy. It’s cool stuff. Two, making it actually work is where enterprises fall down. That’s because of context and security. How do I get the right information to the right agent at the right time so it can do its job? You don’t solve that by building a better search into your knowledge base or by writing clever algorithms. The humans in your company are the subject matter experts. They know how the business is running. Guru effectively gathers those signals from people. Then, agents can connect to our knowledge foundation. Boomi complements that by connecting them securely and with proper access. When I first saw Boomi Connect, I was like, “Oh my god! This is the other missing link in this whole story!” Businesses have so many of these enterprise systems that they can’t replace because they’re too mission-critical. But they were built long before technologies like MCP (model context protocol) existed, and AI can’t interact with them in any productive way. But this changes that. Guru and Boomi are solving the really tough stuff because you can’t just vibe-code a scalable solution.
You’re not a fan of the AI gloom-and-doom narratives.
Rick Nucci: I’m an AI optimist. The narrative of AI replacing jobs comes from the model-makers themselves. It also comes from companies in financial trouble that use replacing humans with AI to shield the real story. They’ve actually overhired. Then, the market rewards them for cutting people. The technology is legitimate, but it’s also derived from human know-how. It amplifies your humans. It shouldn’t replace them. The overused adage is that AI is like an Iron Man suit, not robots. But that’s it in a nutshell. When you properly enable a person with AI, they’re 10x or even 100x their capability. That’s the right approach. The whole narrative around AI replacing jobs won’t work. Think about what a company is. It’s your proprietary know-how and expertise. Your organization has something you figured out that makes you matter more than other companies. If everybody just agentifies everything using all the same models and technology, what are you? You’re just the same as everybody else! That’s why I’m like, can we just stop with the whole economy-is-going-to-shut-down stuff and instead focus on how this radically transforms how employees work and businesses operate when used the right way?
You’ve written that workplace AI adoption is 60% human and 40% technology. Can you explain that?
Rick Nucci: Every technology transformation that’s ever happened is less about the technology and more about how humans change. So much of the conversation is, “Well, the technology can do this.” OK, but do the humans want it to work that way? Humans play a role in these decisions. This feels like a movie I’ve seen before, where everyone opines that everything can be solved with technology. It’s not how the world works. I see so many examples where we go into companies, and they’ve bought this amazing Anthropic thing, turned the machine on, and they’re like, “Now what?” There’s a fundamental reskilling that has to happen top to bottom in the company. At Guru, we call it a “mandatory gift.” We say, we’re not going to replace anyone with AI. But you’re going to radically embrace and learn the technology. Then, wherever you go next in your career, this will make you better. That’s the handshake we’re making. We don’t want employees walking around wondering, “Well, if I agentify this thing, am I agentifying myself out of the job?”
What’s something about you that we wouldn’t know from your LinkedIn profile?
Rick Nucci: I see somewhere between 50 and 60 concerts a year. I don’t really watch sports. I know, you’ll never meet another Philadelphia person who’s not into sports. It’s weird. People will start talking to me about sports, and I’m like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” The only thing I do is watch every Philadelphia Eagles game. That’s my investment. So my sports time goes to live music. I was just in Las Vegas at the Sphere to see Phish. I was at the New Orleans Jazz Fest. Red Rocks (Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado) is a favorite. It’s an epic venue! I saw LCD Soundsystem there last year, and it was amazing.
Up Close With Rick Nucci
Role: Boomi founder and Guru co-founder and CEO
Home: Philadelphia, PA
Education: Penn State, Bachelor’s degree, Logistics, Materials, and Supply Chain Management
Career: Two years after college, helped launch Boomi and served as CTO. He led the company’s transition as the first-ever cloud integration platform in 2007. Three years later, after Dell Technologies acquired the company, he became the Boomi General Manager. He left in 2013 to start Guru.