In this interview from Appian World 2026, Greta Peterman, principal business value engineer at Appian, joins theCUBE's Alison Kosik to discuss how embedding AI directly into enterprise workflows transforms isolated pilots into measurable business outcomes. Peterman frames the challenge with a sharp analogy: AI without a process is an engine without a car — capable in theory, but going nowhere. She explains why enterprise AI must shift from probabilistic to deterministic, ensuring compliance, auditability and trust at scale, particularly in high-stakes workflows like invoice reconciliation and sales order processing. Drawing on a recent engagement with a global med tech provider, Peterman details how applying AI within a structured process revealed millions of dollars in downstream defect savings — a result that underscored the gap between AI novelty and AI value.
The conversation also explores how Appian's data fabric differentiates its platform by providing an agility layer over existing source systems, eliminating the need to build custom connectors and enabling companies to reach ROI in under a year. Peterman references IDC research showing 441% three-year ROI, 51% gains in team efficiency and 59% faster time to market — outcomes she ties directly to addressing cost savings and revenue growth at the same time. She highlights Appian's Composer tool as a driver of rapid application development, enabling IT teams to deliver working prototypes in weeks rather than months. Peterman argues that most organizations still measure AI impact too narrowly, focusing on time savings alone rather than capturing the full dimensions of value across revenue, risk and customer outcomes. From accelerating drug-to-market timelines to freeing skilled workers from administrative burden, she outlines how process-centric AI is becoming the foundation for truly autonomous enterprise operations.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
Appian World 2026. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open the link to automatically sign into the site.
Register for Appian World 2026
Please fill out the information below. You will receive an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for Appian World 2026.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
Appian World 2026. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open the link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to Appian World 2026
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to Appian World 2026. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Are you sure you want to remove access rights for this user?
Details
Manage Access
email address
Community Invitation
Greta Peterman, Appian
Dave Vellante and Alison Kosik sit down with Greta Peterman, Principal Business Value Engineerat Appian from Appian World 2026 at the JW Marriott Orlando, Grande Lakes in
Orlando, FL.
In this interview from Appian World 2026, Greta Peterman, principal business value engineer at Appian, joins theCUBE's Alison Kosik to discuss how embedding AI directly into enterprise workflows transforms isolated pilots into measurable business outcomes. Peterman frames the challenge with a sharp analogy: AI without a process is an engine without a car — capable in theory, but going nowhere. She explains why enterprise AI must shift from probabilistic to deterministic, ensuring compliance, auditability and trust at scale, particularly in high-stakes workflo...Read more
>> Welcome back to Appian World '26. We're streaming live here in Orlando. I'm Alison Kosick and we're about to get into a
conversation about proving AI and automation value. And I want to bring in our
next guest, Greta Peterman. She is the principal
business value engineer at Appian. Welcome to TheCUBE.
Greta Peterman
>> Thank you. - So Greta, it
seems to be we're in a moment
Alison Kosik
>> where everything is about AI. It's everywhere. Everybody's
talking about it. There's a lot of pilots. It just feels like there's a lot of hype. What do you think is driving
the shift toward measurable business outcomes right now?
Greta Peterman
>> Well, I think the key part is that AI in and of itself is just AI. It's like an engine without a car. And you really have to put AI
within a workflow process in order to have it work
deterministically and effectively. Otherwise, it's just an
opportunity without really a targeted outcome.
Alison Kosik
>> And what do you mean deterministically?
Greta Peterman
>> Well, generally AI in and
of itself is probabilistic. And you want to make sure
that it's deterministic, especially when you're working
with a large enterprise. You need to have compliance,
you have auditability. You can't just have it be more of a personal productivity tool in order to actually have it provide measurable outcomes for the business.
Alison Kosik
>> And probabilistic, it's a word that Matt Calkins in the
keynote kind of made fun of. Walk me through ... Define
probabilistic as well.
Greta Peterman
>> Well, when I read one of-
- These are all
Alison Kosik
>> new words, even he said.
Greta Peterman
>> Well, what I found out when I read OpenAI, they had a paper. And what I really loved about it is that it's like when you're a kid going and doing a test, you have some kids that were really good at
guessing what the answers were. And based on patterns, whatever
else, they're really good and they have a pretty
good grade on the test. But the people that actually
know the work, they know that A plus B equals C
and it's deterministic. But otherwise,
probabilities is like, well, based on the patterns, I think it's going to be an outcome like this. When you're talking about an
invoice reconciliation process, you do not want it to be probabilistic. You need to have it absolute. And so you can either set
the temperature between zero or one with AI. Zero is deterministic.
Alison Kosik
>> So you want it reliable and accurate?
Greta Peterman
>> Right. Trustworthy, auditable. Yep.
Alison Kosik
>> Yeah. Deterministic. Okay. So you said that AI without
a target income is like an engine without a car. You just said that. So why is starting with business value the only
way to make AI meaningful?
Greta Peterman
>> Well, you've heard
vibe coding also, right?
Alison Kosik
>> Yes. - It's a term. Vibe
coding generally is we ...
Greta Peterman
>> It's like a personal productivity tool. I kind of consider it as like
if I have an hour saved every week, that's great. I'm going to go grab a coffee,
have a conversation with you. It's not something that an
organization can then take to the bank and say, "This is
what the measurable outcome of personal productivity is. " You really need to
have a structured process and you need to be able to
say, "An invoice process deterministically is going
to improve my throughput by this percentage. " And then that could reduce
my day's sales outstanding. These are board level
objectives that we want to hit, not just personal productivity, which is generally
productivity and leakage.
Alison Kosik
>> Now IDC reports a 441 % three year ROI. So I'm curious, what's
different about organizations that are actually achieving
that level of value?
Greta Peterman
>> Well, I could give
you a personal example. I just worked with a large
med tech provider, global, and they were just going
to dabble with an AI pilot. And what they did was just use AI in a sales order process. And everyone liked what they saw and everyone globally
was clamoring to get it. I worked with a project lead and said, "Let's measure
what the impact of this is. " And so working with her,
we were able to measure that we were reducing downstream
defects in a sales order process in the millions of dollars, catching it earlier versus later. And she was kind of
blown away at the ability to actually measure
the impact of something that seemed like such a small
little AI and process effect. So a small little defect that has a very big
downstream consequence, this is why it's important to measure because it's not just like,
look what cool stuff we can do, but how does it move our business forward? How does it impact our business and our ability to meet our customers and improve that relationship?
Alison Kosik
>> So I'm wondering, how does that example tell us about maybe where companies should start?
Greta Peterman
>> It's important to measure because generally, 20% of something that seems like an exception process has that downstream process, 80% impact. And so if you're just
looking at doing cool things, you're not really addressing
the things that are really ... The friction points between
you and your customer or your friction point between you and your competitors, look at those things that really move the
needle in terms of revenue, market share versus just cost savings.
Alison Kosik
>> Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the
study also shows a 51% increase in internal team efficiency. So then how does that
translate into a real advantage for organizations who are
dealing with talent shortages?
Greta Peterman
>> Well, I think the key is
you're taking the grunt work away from the workers that have been trained. They've got master's degrees and now you're having them do grunt work. If we're able to get the
administrative burden out of that process, you're able
to use those resources on that high value work. And honestly, they're happier
and you have better outcomes.
Alison Kosik
>> Is the real impact here then
not just clearing backlog, but enabling organizations
to say yes to more strategic- >> Absolutely.
- ...
Alison Kosik
>> organizations or opportunities?
Greta Peterman
>> This is where, yeah,
I'd say I've seen amazing.
Greta Peterman
>> I mean, I've been doing this for a while and we've talked about
fail fast, fail forward, but we really haven't been able to see that come to fruition. But I worked with one of our customers and they literally take
one of their IT people, who usually is at a closet
just doing development, right? That person is out
talking to the business, taking a look at their workflow, and then coming back
with an MVP within weeks. Then the business can say,
"Oh, I kind of like that," or, "No, I'm not sure. " But they can edit from something that's already been developed. And we're seeing that with composer and AI development, faster
time to getting a framework for what it could be, and then you're able to
fail fast, fail forward. And so instead of doing one
that takes months, you're able to really develop really
quickly, and that's the impact.
Alison Kosik
>> IDC also found that there's
a 59% faster time to market. Does speed to value now
become the most important competitive metric here
even more than cost savings?
Greta Peterman
>> If you look at, even in your own life, if you could get more revenue
versus cutting out costs of putting your temperature lower
so your bill isn't higher. Revenue is always a much
bigger multiplying effect than cost savings. So if you're looking at
your internal operations, how do you scale your work? Take the administrative
burden out, then you're able to have better throughput, impact from market share
advantage and revenue improvement. And you can do both at once with Appian because you're taking out the grunt work, that's cost savings, but
then you're able improving throughput, which is
being able to bring a drug to market more quickly, for example. That is massive value in every day.
Alison Kosik
>> Oh, obviously. Yes, definitely. And I'm curious how much of
that acceleration comes down to solving the data
problem, getting clean, usable data into the system quickly.
Greta Peterman
>> Well, that's really one of the most important
differentiators for Appian, and that's the data fabric. Other companies will say
they have data fabric, but it's not the way that
our patented process is. And AI, everything, but AI specifically really needs good, clean data in order to be effective. And if you don't have those
access to those sources, then you're kind of stalled. So a lot of companies
are having to do a lot of catch up trying to
build those connectors where we have this data fabric
agility layer over those source systems so you don't have to build that, you're already accessible. So that's how you get this
force multiplier to be able to go faster at speed and getting that ROI within
under a year. It's amazing.
Alison Kosik
>> Yep. And there's often a
trade-off between cost savings and revenue growth, but are you seeing that process transformation and actually delivering
both at the same time?
Greta Peterman
>> 100%.
- How so?
Alison Kosik
>> I mean, the three factors,
revenue, cost savings and risk.
Greta Peterman
>> By improving the workflow,
you're not just doing a task or an AI function, you're
doing the entire workflow. So as I said before, you're taking out the
administrative burden, so you're not doing swivel
chair, copying, pasting, but then you're also being
able to improve the throughput. And like I said, if you can get a drug to market one day faster,
this is millions of dollars, but it's also impacting
people's lives, people that have diabetes and
conditions like that. This is why the work that we
enable is not just technology, but it's enabling what the
mission of our public sector customers or our life sciences or broad markets, I mean, it's amazing because our solution
covers across industries. It's not just one industry specific.
Alison Kosik
>> Yeah. Do you think in general that companies are still
measuring the wrong things when it comes to AI?
Greta Peterman
>> Say that again.
- Do you think
Alison Kosik
>> that companies in general
are still measuring the wrong things when it comes to AI?
Greta Peterman
>> I just think they don't
know how to measure it. They're just looking at, can we use AI? And they're doing little test projects, but they're not really
thinking, how does it impact ... Well, there's three
things that Gartner said. There is extending the current work or, sorry, I take it back, defending what we're currently doing. There's extending our
work just a little bit, and then there's upending the market. And right now, we're just
doing the defend and extend. We haven't really seen the
upending. It will come. But of those two things, you need a process in order to put AI in. And right now, again, I
have a cool engine, a lot of cool engines out there,
but they're not going anywhere yet because they need that process. And that's what Appian
enables is that process. You can plug it in and then
you can see the car go.
Alison Kosik
>> So if we take all of these
gains like efficiency, speed, ROI, how do organizations
move from accelerating today's processes to building a
truly autonomous enterprise?
Greta Peterman
>> It really comes down to understanding what your business's goals are. I mean, every business is
built on a bunch of processes, but every company gets into business because they want an outcome. They want to drive something,
whether it's for the customer. Again, going back to life
sciences, there's Regeneron. They want to make sure that
their people live longer and healthier quality of life. It's not, I want to build
the best invoice process. That's just a part of
that overall end goal. So if we always focus on
enabling our customers to do what their mission, what
their business objective is, we'll always be aligned
to the right things. And I think that's where a
lot of measurement fails. They fail, they're measuring time only. So for an example, it used
to take us three hours, now it takes us one hour. That's two-hour savings
times the frequency of that process, times a labor rate. And I say you're missing a
lot of the dimensions of value because you're just
looking at time savings. It's really time savings and service to making sure that patient has a better
experience at the end of the day, a better quality of life. So how does that two hours freed up enable getting the drug faster to market? That's what you really
need to dimensionalize, not just the time savings. And I would say in general, productivity tools just
measure time alone, and we really have to build
out the other dimensions.
Alison Kosik
>> Let's talk a year, two years,
three years in the future. As Greta Peterman, as the
principal business value engineer of Appian, where do you
see things going as far as what's in your purview?
Greta Peterman
>> Well, I think I would
expect that AI will be able to do a lot of what I do today and say, give me beyond time saving. How does this AI in a workflow
process help my objective? And give me that,
because the word engineer and value engineer is not
like technical engineer. It's more of you want to
position the value in terms of whatever that objective is. And so I'm always creative
at thinking about, well, what else and how else might
I represent that value? And I would hope that AI
could actually learn what I do and do a lot of it. They'll still need the
20% of people to be able to translate this to other people. AI can get you so far, right? But that's what I would like to see is that we don't just do technology
for technology's sake. It's all enabling our
better communication, better connectivity for all of us.
Alison Kosik
>> The conference, what's it been like? What have the customers
been talking to you about? What have the conversations
been like here at Appian World 2026? >> The excitement of
where AI with Composer,
Greta Peterman
>> what we have just launched
is really exciting. And to know that we're
actually doing it with some of our customers is even more exciting. It's not just out here, but it's grounded and we have real experience doing that. And the other thing that
really surprises me, but doesn't surprise me, I said, I've been doing this for 20 years. Companies are still
struggling with basic stuff. You think that like, okay,
BPM's been here forever, business process management software, but they still struggle with
siloed data, siloed processes, non-standardized processes, and we become this agility
leader that connects this, allows customers to be
able to see their data, see a process. I used to work in contact center software. Do you know how many calls come in? What's the status of my X?
Where is this? What's that? If you have visibility to that, you don't have those calls coming in. Each call costs 5 to $10 per
call. So that's just gone away. That's how you measure the
impact of a better visibility, bringing things together
with an agility layer. Anyway, that's what I'm seeing
is that companies, as much as we talk about the hype, we're still-
Alison Kosik
>> There's still a lot of work to do, which means all those legacy players still have a lot of work to do. It means more business.
Greta Peterman
>> Yeah, there's still work.
Alison Kosik
>> Thanks so much for your time,
Greta. Great conversation. >> Thank you.
- And you've been watching TheCUBE,
Alison Kosik
>> the leader in live technology coverage
Greta Peterman
>> and enterprise tech analysis. Thanks for watching.
Alison Kosik