The AI arms race has a new front, and it isn’t the battle over individual models — it’s war for the entire AI control plane.

That theme was front and center at Boomi World in Chicago, where Boomi LP Chief Executive Officer Steve Lucas spent two hours on stage steering the conversation away from model hype and toward the harder problems — data activation, governance and execution at scale. For Boomi itself, the hard work is behind them and the opportunity ahead is enormous, according to John Furrier (pictured, right), co-founder and CEO of SiliconANGLE Media Inc.

“The analysis is clear. We’ve covered Boomi now for almost a decade through their different evolutions,” Furrier said. “The AI control plane is hitting Chicago here at Boomi World, because they have a very strong opinion of this. Most people are obsessed over models, token economics — those things certainly important. But, at the end of the day, the enterprise is ultimately going to decide because that’s where the work’s getting done, that’s where the agents will thrive as they pivot off or extend off of all the coding values coming out. Agents are the next wave behind the coding — and Boomi’s been [preparing for] this.”

“[Lucas] spoke about the forever problem, which he turned into the forever opportunity,” he said. “The forever problem is complexity, and complexity can be an opportunity if you simplify things and make things go faster.”

Lucas struck a notably grounded tone for a major AI event — zeroing in on the trust layer and the foundational work enterprises need to complete inside their workflows before autonomous agents can scale, Allen noted. Boomi’s Agentstudio platform, now running more than 75,000 agents in production across its customer base, reflects that philosophy, with its Agent Control Tower built to deliver governance and auditability across every deployment, according to Furrier.

The question now isn’t whether the architecture is ready — it’s whether Boomi can execute at the speed the market demands.

“They’ve got the piece parts; they’ve got the system view. It’s going to be coming down to how fast they can scale up,” Furrier said. “I think the integration story is the new middleware — middleware goes away as we know it. This is an agent layer.”

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

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE