In this interview from Appian World 2026, Jake Rank, vice president of product management at Appian, joins theCUBE's Dave Vellante to discuss how organizations are embedding AI reliably into operational workflows through purpose-built process platforms. Rank walks through a series of product announcements, beginning with significant enhancements to Appian's document processing capabilities — an area that surged in customer adoption in 2025. He explains how AI-generated configuration recommendations can push document extraction accuracy from 80% to 99%, giving enterprises a structured path to value rather than a frustrating cycle of ad hoc AI experimentation. Rank also details how Appian's expanded agent offering now supports continuous human feedback, with one internal test showing an agent jump from 75% to 95% accuracy in just 30 minutes. The conversation also explores Appian's data fabric — a read/write virtualization layer that unifies enterprise data across sources without requiring migration or re-platforming. Rank contrasts it with data warehouses and materialized views, underscoring that data fabric is an operational system capable of powering real processes, not just reports. He details a context layer that encodes semantic meaning so agents know which records to query, which relationships to follow and which values to filter — eliminating guesswork and enabling reliable agentic decision-making. Rank also addresses Appian's adoption of MCP, which opens its data and process assets to external agents and AI systems across the enterprise ecosystem. From managing model drift through continuous feedback loops to mixing deterministic and agentic workflows for regulatory and cost efficiency, Rank provides a practical roadmap for how organizations can embed AI into core operations without sacrificing control.