Somewhere inside every large company, there is a long list of AI pilots — promising, applauded, then quietly shelved. The culprit, more often than not, is a data activation failure.

The gap between AI ambition and enterprise reality is widening as organizations struggle with legacy systems and shadow AI building inside every business function. Boomi LP has positioned itself squarely in the center of that gap, framing data activation— getting the right data to the right systems at machine speed — as the unglamorous prerequisite that makes agentic AI viable in production, according to Boomi Chief Executive Officer Steve Lucas (pictured).

“Last year we were talking about AI agents — and honestly, the year before that as well,” Lucas said. “This year, the agents aren’t coming. They’re here. AI is starting to become not just a pervasive conversation in the enterprise — it is being deployed. It is real. We’re starting to see real ROI coming from AI and agents in enterprise processes, integrations and automations.”

Lucas spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen at Boomi World 2026, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed data activation, AI governance, the future of the enterprise builder persona and Boomi’s strategy for harnessing AI at scale. (* Disclosure below.)

Data activation and the enterprise AI readiness gap

The path to AI readiness starts long before any model is selected. Fragmented data pipelines, mainframe dependencies and decades of legacy enterprise resource planning systems remain serious obstacles to the fluid, real-time data flows that agents require, Lucas noted.

“You’ve got to get your arms around your data,” he said. “‘Where is it? Is it of quality? Can I deliver it in real time?’ If you are struggling to deliver data to human intelligence in real time with quality, how do you think that’s going to play out for AI that operates thousands of times faster?”

But data readiness is only part of the equation — the harder work is orchestrating agents as they develop skills over time and deploying them against specific, domain-validated workflows, Lucas explained. Real-world results are emerging: Lexitas, a Chronicle Bidco Inc. company, has automated nearly 50% of its highly regulated payment processing through AI agents on the Boomi platform, with oversight flowing through Boomi’s governance plane, he noted. A second customer, Multiquip Inc., has automated roughly 80% of technician support queries through agents, eliminating the need to manually search thousands of product manuals. Examples such as these point to a maturation curve moving faster than most expect.

“The first thing that organizations want is domain-specific AI, not generalized AI. If I’m a healthcare organization, I want HIPAA-compliant, healthcare-specific, domain-specific AI. Number two [is] they want to understand, ‘How does this plug into my business process?'” he said. “We’re gonna go from generalized ROI to domain-specific ROI — very quickly.”

To support containerized, model-agnostic deployment at scale, Boomi this week announced a strategic collaboration with Red Hat Inc. to deliver a single integrated stack for agentic AI — pairing Boomi’s Agentstudio with Red Hat AI so organizations can run open-weight models privately rather than exposing enterprise data to frontier model providers, Lucas explained. The logic is straightforward: Model choice is not a differentiator — control is.

“Which AI model is right for your company? The answer is all of them,” he said. “If all of the models are the right answer, how do I harness those? How do I containerize them? Having that container with our runtime, with those models, now you can privatize AI, you can build your data geometry — your graph that is unique to your company — not help somebody else build their trillion-dollar company.”

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