On this segment of The Six Five LIVE, host Lisa Martin welcomes Steve Lucas, CEO of Boomi at CES 2024. They discuss Boomi AI, AI readiness, and the growth of the company.
Their discussion also covers:
- Steve’s strategic vision for Boomi and how it has come to life in the past year
- How Boomi is helping organizations become AI-ready with Boomi GPT and Boomi AI
- What is next for the company
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Transcript:
Lisa Martin: Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Six Five Live. We’re live in Las Vegas at CES 2024. I’m media host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be here with the CEO of Boomi, Steve Lucas. Steve is a longtime veteran of enterprise software, nearly 30 years leading the helm of CEO and senior executive at Marketo, Adobe, BusinessObjects, SAP, Salesforce, iCIMS, you name it. Now for a year, a little over, Steve has been at the helm of Boomi, which is a leading global SaaS company focused on integration and automation. A lot has happened in the last year and Steve’s going to tell us about it now. Steve, great to see you. Welcome to The Six Five Live.
Steve Lucas: Thank you for having me, Lisa. Awesome to be here.
Lisa Martin: It is, and congratulations, by the way.
Steve Lucas: Thank you. It’s been a year. Boomi’s an amazing company and I’ve loved every minute of it.
Lisa Martin: Talk me through some of those defining moments over the last year where you really started to see key elements of your strategic vision manifesting and coming to life.
Steve Lucas: Well, first of all, it’s always customer, customer, customer. It’s customer adoption. What are they doing with Boomi? You said it. Boomi is integration and automation. Most companies, they have motivations like, “We need to digitally transform.” So they start adopting cloud applications, new software, but they forget, “Oh, we need an integration and automation platform.” That’s where Boomi comes in. We are the integration and automation platform. We connect everything from apps, to data, to devices, apropos, because we’re at CES and pretty much every device on the planet’s here.
Lisa Martin: It is here. And of course, what else is here? AI, AI, AI. The world has been taken by storm and just a little over a year since ChatGPT was born and every company is saying, “We need to get on the AI train.” But what does that mean? How do we do it? You guys announced just a few months ago at Boomi World Tour in Silicon Valley where I had the pleasure of working with you there, Boomi AI and Boomi GPT. Talk to us about those. How is Boomi helping organizations really adopt the fundamentals of AI and become AI ready?
Steve Lucas: Well, I think there’s probably very few people that haven’t heard of GPT or at least said it once now in the past year, and it really is changing everything in the world of software. What Boomi GPT does is it takes the integration and automation that we provide and it literally lets anyone in an organization use it, apply it. Here’s what I mean. Normally when you’re thinking about things like, how does my invoicing work? How does my supply chain work, how does employee onboarding work? If you want to build a business process for one of those kind of workflows, you need someone that knows the technology, knows the systems, how to connect.
With Boomi GPT and Boomi AI, we’ve eliminated all of that. You can literally use natural language to type in things like, “Create my lead-to-cash process, go.” And what we’re building right now is even more transformative. We’re going to allow our customers to ask it questions about your business. So if I have a question like, “Why didn’t an invoice process?” Literally, you can ask your business a question about itself. That’s what Boomi AI is doing. So we’re radically simplifying how integration and automation work inside of organizations, who can use it, and how quickly you can get to the benefit.
Lisa Martin: And speaking of quick to benefits, I saw a video, Steve, where you were talking about a staggering statistic in terms of what Boomi AI is able to enable IT resources to save on doing integrations. Share that with the audience because it’s big.
Steve Lucas: Yeah. Well, we set out a design goal when we said, “Hey, we’re going to embrace this AI and generative pre-trained transformer technology, but we want to reduce the amount of effort to integrate and automate your systems by 90%.” We reached that goal. That’s what we’re delivering for customers today, a 90% reduction in the work effort. And when you think about IT budgets, they’re not going up. They’re staying flat, they’re going down. CIOs are being asked to do more with less. So Boomi’s bringing this technology to the table that reduces your effort to drive integration and automation, which ultimately begets digital transformation by 90%. Why would you not look at that?
Lisa Martin: It’s a game changer.
Steve Lucas: Yup.
Lisa Martin: And a huge differentiator for Boomi.
Steve Lucas: Yeah.
Lisa Martin: So talk a little bit about, here we are at CES, I know there are some great customer stories. Boomi has tons of great customers, I know that firsthand
Steve Lucas: Yeah. Over 20,000.
Lisa Martin: Over 20,000 now. That’s amazing. Here we are, we expect as consumers, everything is connected, we are connected all the time. We can get access to anything, any transaction. Here we are at CES where AI, AI, AI is the name of the game. You had a chance to walk the show floor. What were some of the things that you saw that you think maybe Boomi can actually drive innovations here?
Steve Lucas: Well, when I walk the show floor, you kind of remember that from the Matrix, that digital view of everything. I mean, I’m looking at every single device knowing that Boomi not only connects apps and data, but we connect devices. We have amazing customers, and I’ll get to that. Some of them are from healthcare and audio and all kinds of amazing things, but I walk the show floor besides seeing every robot lawnmower that you can think of. But the reality is Boomi connects all of these systems, all of these devices. We connect all of that. So for any organization that’s looking to integrate their devices. We have a company, for example, that they use Boomi to connect to a dryer at a university to tell a student on an app when their clothes are dry.
Lisa Martin: Nice.
Steve Lucas: So we have infinite use cases, but I was walking the show floor just obviously blown away with the amount of innovation. But that’s where Boomi focuses is on coupling the innovation that people want to drive with how they connect to their customers and their operational systems.
Lisa Martin: And you mentioned some great use cases. Healthcare is one of the ones that always fascinates me because it affects everybody. Digital health, all of the things going on here with health technology. We’re so used to wearables. I feel naked without my wearable today, left it at home. But all of the great things that AI is enabling consumers to do. Do you feel that there is a sense of consumers may be feeling a little bit more comfortable with AI since there’s been a lot of challenges with it from a branding perspective?
Steve Lucas: I think whether it’s a consumer or a corporation, it could be any kind. The first thing you got to get over is the comfort around the use of your data. And that’s where Boomi gets pulled in as well is because what we are doing with AI and specifically Boomi AI, is we’re enabling customers to power their AI visions, but do it in a secure and managed way. That’s what you ultimately want to do. We have customers today, take INOVIS for example, great healthcare customer. They’re using Boomi to integrate their supply chain, and that’s just one example of literally hundreds if not thousands of use cases in healthcare for Boomi.
Lisa Martin: That’s fantastic. Talk a little bit about, one of the things that I know that you say is technology needs to serve a purpose. It has to drive business outcomes. How is Boomi AI going to be that game changer for organizations to deliver better outcomes to their end users faster?
Steve Lucas: Well, this is the thing. I’ve been in this industry for a long time. You walk into any organization, there’s so much undeployed technology, so much shelfware. It’s not serving a purpose. It’s not driving that net benefit for the company. What Boomi’s all about is ensuring that no matter what your software investment, that we’re able to get you to that benefit faster. So if you’ve invested in SAP, Oracle, it doesn’t matter. We’re able to integrate all of your technology into a supply chain landscape. We have one amazing customer, Sonos as a great case in point. I mean, they’re integrating hundreds of systems with their SAP supply chain technology. So these types of things are great examples of how Boomi is accelerating that time to benefit.
Lisa Martin: That’s what it’s all about, is accelerating, accelerating that time to value. Last question for you, Steve. You just passed the one-year mark at Boomi, as we talked about in the beginning of the conversation, what’s next? What does the horizon look like from your lens?
Steve Lucas: Well, you said it. First of all, it’s AI, but it’s also API. It’s the world that we live in, and again, CES here in Las Vegas, I think it’s very apropos. Everything in the world has an API now. I have an API, although you mentioned the wearables, right? We all have APIs, it’s AI and APIs, and it’s how do we bring those two worlds together. Everything that’s driven by an API on the right hand, a programming interface, and how can you then automate and integrate those with AI and artificial intelligence on the left? We’re bringing those worlds together at Boomi, and that’s what we want to do for our 20,000 plus customers is help them usher in the future, and it’s going to be AI and APIs.
Lisa Martin: I love that. Any sneak peeks at Boomi World, which is coming up in May that you can share?
Steve Lucas: Well, you probably heard we have Coach Prime speaking.
Lisa Martin: I did.
Steve Lucas: I’m so excited about that. I mean, he’s truly amazing. He’s a perfect example of someone that’s just incredibly innovative, and that’s what we want to showcase. We’re going to be showing an entire range of capabilities the world’s never seen around AI. We’re also launching a task automation technology that anyone can use, automating your entire work life from your phone. So there’s a lot of exciting stuff coming.
Lisa Martin: Excellent, Steve. We look forward to see you there. Thank you so much for joining us on The Six Five Live, sharing what’s happened in the last year and what’s to come for Boomi. We appreciate your time.
Steve Lucas: Thank you.
Lisa Martin: My pleasure. For Steve Lucas, I’m Lisa Martin. You’re watching The Six Five Live, live from CES 2024.
Author Information
Lisa Martin is a technology correspondent and former NASA scientist who has made a significant impact in the tech industry. After earning a masters in cell and molecular biology, she worked on high-profile NASA projects that flew in space before further exploring her artistic side as a tech storyteller. As a respected marketer and broadcaster, she's interviewed industry giants and thought leaders like Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger, Suze Orman and Deepak Chopra, as she has a talent for making complex technical concepts accessible to both insiders and laypeople. With her unique blend of science, marketing, and broadcasting experience, Lisa provides insightful analysis on the latest tech trends and innovations. Today, she's a prominent figure in the tech media landscape, appearing on platforms like "The Watch List" and iHeartRadio, sharing her expertise and passion for science and technology with a wide audience.
