Every business has been chasing the same digital promise for years. How do our IT investments for connecting systems and automating processes scale with our ever-expanding business needs? The belief was that modern, more intelligent systems could keep up the pace while adapting to an evolving competitive landscape.
In many ways, it worked. Foundational systems of truth, like ERPs and CRMs, have delivered on managing core business processes and creating trusted records within those tightly coupled environments. Fantastic!
Yet as businesses grew and evolved, so did expectations. That introduced new waves of friction. The SaaS explosion of latest-and-greatest cloud applications has been truly innovative. But those satellite apps suddenly ballooned in number as each business unit began demanding specific apps, leading to redundancies, higher expenses, and increased complexity across the entire technology landscape. That massive investment is not producing the anticipated results.
I call this the impact gap.
It’s the widening space between the promise of what technology should enable and deliver and the reality of what the business can actually achieve today. It’s why organizations struggle so mightily with unmet expectations and an inability to show bottom-line value from their massive tech expenditures. There are three symptoms of this underlying chasm that slow the business every day.
- Swivel chair operations. It’s when integrations and automated processes aren’t getting the job done. Employees, like business analysts, are copying and pasting information from systems into Excel. They’re taking data from one application and manually shifting it to another because the actual integration doesn’t achieve the goal. Or it only deals with “the happy path” and not the business reality of exceptions.
- System design for stability, not change. Something happens, and a business has to pivot quickly. It might be small, like a regulatory change, a competitive need, or an opportunity. The organization has to move fast. But then, IT comes back and says it will take six months or a year to make that happen.
- Fragmented truth dilemma. Even with integration processes, key data remains trapped in systems. Employees are always complaining about data quality, not having the information they need, or knowing it exists in other systems, yet somehow can’t get to it in the format they need. So, they have to create manual processes and workarounds to address the problem. In other words, people act as a form of middleware.
These problems are common in every business. The solution is not more software, better integrations, or building more pipelines. Instead, the answer is to change the unit of work. We need to move from the traditional task-based integration to role-based autonomy.
That requires using AI agents.
This foundational shift in how we architect the digital work is already happening. Task-based integrations are rigid, hard-coded pipelines. They’re built with that ideal “happy path” in mind, not the real world of exceptions. They’re not adaptable and cannot easily cope with everyday changes, such as data updates.
But role-based autonomy is about delegating high-level business goals to intelligent, trusted agents. They can leverage the toolbox of existing integrations and APIs to reason and plan their own dynamic path to achieve the goal. That allows agents to handle emerging problems, deal with data in unforeseen formats, or manage those one-in-a-thousand exceptions. Businesses can transform workflows from a fragile assembly line into a resilient, adaptive colleague.
One way to think about this agentic transformation is with a travel analogy: the train versus the all-terrain vehicle.
Consider the current technology stack. There are foundational systems, SaaS applications, APIs, integrations, and so on. Together, these are comparable to a high-speed bullet train. Now, these trains are incredibly powerful and efficient. But they can only go where the rails will take them. If the destination suddenly changes? Sorry, the train can’t turn. You need time (and money) to put down new rails. That’s a good description for the state of traditional IT and how it adjusts (or not) to market shifts.
On the other hand, agentic automation is like deploying a fleet of ATVs. They can go “off the rails” – anywhere. They just need a destination and will figure out how to get there on their own. So when instructions tell them, “Go to the mountaintop,” they plot the best path. And if they get halfway up and find that the way is blocked, they just reroute autonomously. They’re not following a script. They perceive the terrain, and they adapt.
The technology we’ve built during the age of digital transformation wasn’t wrong. In fact, it serves as the foundation for what’s happening now. And as the world changes, agents are the next step. They’re not just more tools. They’re a new kind of software teammate within the company. They plan, reason, recalibrate, and act with the systems and tools that businesses have already built.
It’s why the impact gap is solvable. It’s just the space between the digital promise and the business reality you have today. The question is, how do we close that gap? You do this by leveraging a well-governed agentic fabric that connects all applications, integrations, data sources, and APIs – unifying your technology investments and enabling you to identify them and achieve your business goals with agility.
The best way to do this is with Boomi.
Explore how agentic architectures enable adaptable, resilient workflows—starting with Agentstudio, Boomi’s environment for building and governing AI-driven agents.
And stay tuned for our upcoming ebook, Architecting for Agents. It dives deeper into how to design systems that thrive in an agent-first world.