Business process evolution driven by AI agents at Workato – News

The adoption of AI agents will likely change more than just business process workflows. Agents have the capability to take on tasks in much the same way that humans pitch in and help.

This wave of “new colleagues” entering the workforce has the potential to dramatically reshape the role of IT. It could also transform the company culture that surrounds it, according to Markus Zirn (pictured), chief strategy officer of Workato Inc.

“In 10 years, we might all just watch all these agents do what we used to do,” Zirn said. “There will be a change [that] is very dramatic. Up until now, IT people, or people they work with, think of technology as machines, it’s like system applications. With these AI agents, basically you have to think of them as colleagues, as people.”

Zirn spoke with theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson at the WOW: World of Workato event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed AI’s impact on Workato’s customers and the extension of agents across the enterprise platform. (* Disclosure below.)

Supporting the business process platform

The impact of agentic AI is already being seen in outcomes generated by customer adoption of Workato’s tools, Zirn noted. This includes Workato One, an agentic stack for bringing AI, enterprise systems and human workflows into one cohesive architecture, and Genie, the no-code platform for building and managing AI agents.

“I lead our field CTO organization, and they’re working with the most interesting customers,” Zirn said. “These are actually people being CTO’s, CIOs in large companies. What we’re seeing is the power that Workato One gives the customer, just a platform where they can do everything they need to. I’ll start off doing an IT help desk Genie, but it’s my proof point, if this works, then I’m going to do more.”

Despite interest in AI agents among CIOs and CTOs, there are concerns around the return on investment. Earlier this week, MIT released a study that reported only 5% of AI pilot programs achieved rapid revenue acceleration, with a significant majority of those surveyed receiving little or no measurable impact.

“We don’t see that at Workato,” Zirn said, during a discussion with theCUBE about the MIT report. “I think it’s because we are at the core, because we’re connected to the systems. It’s a different approach. We’re seeing 80% of these things we start actually materialize.”

For companies such as Workato, that are deeply involved in agentic AI development, there is an underlying interest in extending the technology to the far reaches of the enterprise. Among Workato’s announcements at the conference this week was Agent Knowledge Graph, which connects agents to an enterprise-wide data fabric, and support for Model Context Protocol, that can expose agents as APIs or services to foster agentic collaboration.

“We worked 10 years on doing this Workato orchestration platform, and we can help [customers] very rapidly get it ready to then do their AI transformation,” Zirn said. “It’s a unified platform that can help you with all the things that you need. It’s not just agents, it’s a lot more than that.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the WOW: World of Workato event:

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

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