Boomi LP was not necessarily the first company to talk convincingly about the future of AI agents, but it could be safely said that agents were a major topic of discussion at its annual conference one year ago.

Today, agentic AI is one of the hot button topics in the tech world, and Boomi has framed the discussion around an “era of AI-driven automation.” Boomi’s customers have deployed 33,000 AI agents to date, and organizations are beginning to deploy automation that goes beyond simple tasks.

Boomi’s Matt McLarty talked with theCUBE about AI agents during Boomi World.

“We started off with people saying last year, ‘Oh agents? OK, well that’s interesting,’ to this year being like, ‘I’m so sick of agents, but I still don’t know how to use them,’” said Matt McLarty (pictured), chief technology officer of Boomi. “A lot of what we’re putting out here is a simple-to-use platform that allows you to build your agents, build tools that can be used by agents, but also here’s examples of agents that you can actually build with the platform.”

McLarty spoke with theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Paul Nashawaty at Boomi World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed interest in AI agents and the tools customers will need to build them. (* Disclosure below.)

AI agents: Finding a standardized model interface

To build on the wave of interest in AI agents, Boomi announced support this week for Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a standardized open-source interface for integrating large language models with external data. The potential for a standardized interface in the rapidly changing AI arena is generating interest around MCP, according to McLarty.

“I asked the room yesterday, ‘How many people have heard of MCP, and all the hands went up,’” McLarty said. “I asked, ‘How many people had heard of MCP four months ago?’ And a few hipsters put up their hands. The reason there’s so much excitement around MCP isn’t because it’s the greatest protocol, but it’s the promise of MCP. It’s, ‘Hey, you can connect to all your services in one place and it’s this big normalizing thing.’”

Boomi also announced new services and integration tools that customers can use to automate data pipeline creation and accelerate analytics. The latest releases were in keeping with the firm’s vision as an integration “platform-as-a-service” and role in facilitating operations for enterprise IT.

“With Boomi, we’ve always been about interoperability and being shock absorbers in the enterprise architecture,” McLarty said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Boomi World:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Boomi World. Neither Boomi LP, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE