For Boomi, it's all about integration when it comes to AI

According to findings from a new Total Economic Impact (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting commissioned by Boomi, organizations using theBoomi Enterprise Platform achieved a 347% return on investment (ROI) and a net present value (NPV) of US$9.8 million over three years, with a payback period of under six months.

The AI-driven automation vendor continues to provide organizations with the essential foundation to orchestrate complex workflows with speed, security, and simplicity. At Boomi World 2025 in May, the vendor announced five new AI agents, general availability of the Agentstudio agent life-cycle management product and more integration with Amazon.

CRN Asia speaks to David Irecki, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Asia Pacific / Japan (APJ) at Boomi to understand more about the vendor plans in the region, including how its working with partners and providing customers with right solutions.

“We're seeing quite a significant shift from digital transformation initiatives to agentic transformation. We're talking to a lot of companies throughout Southeast Asia and across APAC as a whole, and we're starting to see a lot more trepidation, with senior leadership looking for results out of the AI investments,” Irecki said.

As businesses look towards the transformation shift, it's now moving towards how they can enhance their existing automations by embedding AI into current integrations.

“Take order fulfilment for example. If you're a retailer and you're looking to ship something to someone, rather than having or doing a call out to an API for a local carrier, you now have an AI agent there who can connect to multiple carriers and can go. The AI is able to, in real time, optimize decision making processes. And that's really the crux of what we're seeing,” Irecki said.

It's all about integration

The Boomi Enterprise Platform replaces costly and brittle point-to-point integrations with a unified, low-code solution that simplifies architecture and accelerates time to value. Put simply, Boomi eliminates the friction of integration complexity. With pre-built agents and connectors, robust APIs, and drag-and-drop workflows, organizations can dramatically cut integration times from weeks to days and free up IT resources for innovation.

“ Every organization has an automation issue, data quality issue and they're worried about how to secure the data and expose it via API. So, it's across the board, but we are seeing different use cases in different areas. In higher education as an example, it might be around getting a better understanding of the student and their journey through the university. If you're thinking about healthcare and insurance, it might be around using agentic systems to automate claims processing,” Irecki explained.

For Irecki, a lot of the conversations he has with customers start at AI, whether it's generative or agentic. But when the layers are pulled back, many of the businesses he talks to, especially in Southeast Asia, are still struggling with legacy modernization.

“It's siloed. So how do customers get better quality? Data liquidity and data quality are two of the biggest inhibitors of a successful AI implementation and organization, because without having the right data at the right time and data that can provide context to an AI system, you're going to get the long outcome for your business,” he said.

Irecki explained that for businesses to get the best outcome for their AI investments, it depends where the conversation starts.

“I still like to talk about the foundational layer which is a practical approach to AI. So, using integration automation to connect your systems together, using data management to provide a high level of data quality, and then using APIs to expose the data from the organization to AI, because at the end of the day, AI agents, they use APIs to access systems, trigger actions and complete tasks. Without APIs, agents are essentially blind. They can't access information in your organization. That's the foundational layer.”

“Then on the other side of it is assisting customers with two things. One is Agent design, which is able to very quickly and easily build agents through a traditional low code interface, which is what Boomi is well known for. But one of the more interesting discussions that have been popping up recently, is around shadow AI. More companies are saying that lines of business are bringing AI agents or generative models into their day-to-day work, and it has no view of how they're being used.”

“So, Boomi released Control Tower, and that allows you to capture those agents that are running in your business and be able to see or provide a level of observability from what access, what data are those agents accessing and who's accessing those agents, what outcomes are they providing, and if necessary, provide a kill switch to turn those agents off,” he explained.

The role of partners

Looking at Boomi’s partner ecosystem in Southeast Asia, Irecki acknowledges that partners are really key to Boomi’s approach to the market. This is because partners are the ones that not only have the contacts within customers, but they have the vertical and industry knowledge required, as well as the language and cultural norms.

“You can't cover all of that, particularly with the direct team. So, partners are a very important route to market for us in Southeast Asia and across the APJ market, and we work hand in hand with them. So, we have a co-sell motion with them. They're bringing their expertise from their knowledge around their customers and the vertical. We're bringing our product expertise and together working towards what is that best solution for the customer. It seems to be a working, a winning model in business in this region.”

“If you go direct, it's a very hard proposition, because you're trying to build trust, and partners have a lot of their trust with customers already. You're trying to build credibility as well, and often with a lot of these discussions, whether they're agentic or not, Boomi especially, is the backbone to an organization or the central nervous system. We underpin a lot of capabilities, and the solutions that our customers need often need other components to put them together as well, and that's where the partner skills and expertise come into play,” Irecki said.

At the same time, Irecki also mentioned that partners are now looking at conversations beyond integration and automation as customers just want to talk about AI.

“It's interesting that the entry point for a conversation with partners is AI, but it very quickly goes back to integration, data, etc. So, it goes to show that organizations still do not really have that full understanding of the infrastructure that's needed, which is core to any AI deployment. It is interesting to see some of the changes that are happening in the leadership as well around us, because we're seeing more companies putting in specialist advisors, like a chief AI officer. They're also looking to see what roles are required to align with those long-term goals,” Irecki added.

Looking forward

For Irecki, it's definitely a very bright and positive future for Boomi and organizations in the region. While there’s no stopping the agentic wave, he believes the next six months will be crucial to understanding the use cases and proving out the ROI, which is going to be key.

“I think that shift in the journey from digital transformation to agenda transformation, and those changes in businesses, not just adopting new technologies, but changes in business processes, how staff are enabled, and new route to markets, that's probably going to may be the most exciting thing, because the products and technologies we're building and selling today, they are going to be very different in five and 10 years,” he concluded.