Enterprise software has no shortage of AI enthusiasm, but the gap between AI potential and production-ready results continues to frustrate organizations investing in enterprise process automation.

As generative AI matures, building agents is no longer the hard part — keeping them accurate, auditable and useful on live business workflows is. That’s the real differentiator between ad hoc AI and an intentional path to value, according to Jake Rank (pictured), vice president of product management at Appian Corp.

“We are not asking people to use AI on its own,” Rank said. “We are asking people to use features that are built with AI as part of the backbone. But the fact that we’ve built all the structure around [it] — built the feature around it — you’re getting the value, you’re getting an assured path to value because it’s not just ad hoc AI, it’s actually a feature. It’s an intentional way of solving a business problem that happens to use AI.”

Rank spoke with Dave Vellante at Appian World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed enterprise process automation and Appian’s product announcements, including expanded document processing, agentic collaboration and data fabric enhancements with Model Context Protocol support. (* Disclosure below.)

Enterprise process automation gets a reliability engine

Among the most significant announcements at Appian World 2026 was the expansion of the company’s document processing capabilities in its DocCenter offering. New support for complex Excel files — including large spreadsheets with macros, split cells and multiple tabs — extends the reach of AI-driven document intelligence into some of the most stubborn corners of enterprise data, Rank noted. The key is a feedback loop that automatically recommends configuration changes when accuracy falls short.

“We look at all the failures and actually use AI to automatically generate recommendations for how you should tweak the configuration so that you, even being a non-expert, can sit down and very rapidly go through that feedback loop to go from 80% to 90% to 99% accurate,” Rank said. “That’s actually a number that we see pretty often with our customers.”

Appian’s agentic capabilities received similar treatment. The company introduced inline agent collaboration — embedding an AI assistant directly into a task screen so workers can access contextual help without leaving the workflow. This addresses a growing concern about the loss of institutional knowledge as workforce turnover accelerates, Rank explained. Feedback mechanisms now allow users to rate agent outputs with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down, and the platform uses that signal to generate actionable improvement recommendations.

“We saw an initial agent that was 75% accurate go up to 95% accuracy with just 30 minutes of feedback,” Rank said. “It’s quite rapid actually, and you don’t need a ton of instances.”

Underpinning all of it is Appian’s data fabric, which the company has developed for years as a read-write virtualization layer across enterprise data sources. The platform lets information stay in systems of record while being queried, related and secured at row or column level — without the overhead of a data warehouse migration, Rank said. A new MCP integration, announced at the event, opens data fabric to third-party agents and external AI tools, extending the platform’s reach while keeping process governance intact.

“We’ve enabled our own agents to use MCP tools,” Rank said. “All the value that you’ve built in Appian with the tools for processes are going to be available for you in your enterprise to take advantage of whether you’re using Appian’s AI or other AI. Mixing deterministic processes and agentic processes together lets you pick the most appropriate way to solve any problem.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Appian World 2026:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE