Boomi World 2025 | Sanjay Menon, Boomi

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Sanjay Menon

Vice President, Strategy and Business Development

Boomi

play_circle_outline Automation and AI conversation

play_circle_outline Maximizing success through lessons from failed RPA projects and the importance of being API-led

play_circle_outline Boomi Agent Studio capabilities

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Sanjay Menon, Boomi

Sanjay Menon

Vice President, Strategy and Business Development Boomi

Sanjay Menon, vice president of strategy and business deployment at Boomi LP, joins theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Paul Nashawaty at Boomi World 2025 to unpack the next phase of enterprise automation. The conversation explores how organizations can move beyond outdated RPA models and embrace AI-native, API-led strategies for integration and agility.

Menon addresses common misconceptions about automation, emphasizing the need for flexible architectures that accommodate both legacy systems and future-facing innovations. The conversation highlights Boo... Read more

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What is the speaker's perspective on automation and AI, and what are they working on in terms of AI-driven automation? add

What is the best approach for someone who has experienced a failed RPA project and is now looking to move in a new direction? add

What are the challenges and considerations when implementing traditional automation processes in a multi-cloud environment? add

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Sanjay Menon, Boomi

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Paul Nashawaty

>> We'll be fine.

Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon Boomi fans and welcome back to Dallas, Texas. We're here at Boomi World 2025. My name is Savannah Peterson, midway through day two of our power packed coverage here. And I'm joined by Paul. We're nodding. We're having a good time?

Paul Nashawaty

>> We are. - You've just been a

Savannah Peterson

>> joy to co-host with this week.

Paul Nashawaty

>> It's been fun. It's been great.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I know, we've learned. We've had some really interesting

Savannah Peterson

>> conversations.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And this topic, I'm really excited for.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right- - Automation.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know this is right up your alley. Yeah.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Awesome. - Sanjay, thank you so much

Savannah Peterson

>> for coming to hang out with us.

Sanjay Menon

>> Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, we're very pumped.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So we're going to be talking about automation

Savannah Peterson

>> and we're going to be talking about automation and AI. Automation, not new, AI conversation, quite new. Talk to us about that union and what you're working on.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely. I feel bad for automation. It gets a bad rap sometimes.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, you for automation.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. It's a red-headed stepchild because you hear about over the last 10 years, you hear about bots and all these rigid workflows and everyone invested in these and now, it's rearing its ugly head right now, which everyone's figuring out, "Hey, the ROI on that wasn't so good, right? " A UX breaks, you can't track what's happening in the workflow afterwards. So what this week is about is really AI-driven automation and how we're trying to just meet customers where they are. We recognize that you're not going to change what's existing in your workflows today. We're trying to meet all your legacy, on-prem, hybrid systems and then just help you embed agents in that. And that's what we really think automation's about.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So Sanjay, let's talk about failed RPA projects that happen. You led with the fact that automation's not new, but it has a bad rap sometimes 'cause people would try to do things, it didn't work the way we want it to be. I always say when we talk about AI, human in the loop is still necessary, but automation is key for productivity and operational excellence. So if somebody has done the failed RPA project, what are they going to do if they say, "Okay, I'm not gun-shy now. I want to do something, I want to move in this direction. " What would you advise them?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, no, it is a great question. And actually, Rahul Pathak from AWS had a great analogy yesterday, which basically said, "Hey, when we got vacuum cleaners, we didn't clean faster, we got bigger houses. " And so basically what we're trying to do is help customers say, "Hey, there's a lot more you can do. It's not just that you're going to have..." and I have to give him credit, it's a great, great analogy, but to go back to your question is look, I think one thing we're hearing from customers is they want to be API-led. Look, there are some things where you're on a factory floor and you have some legacy systems that you just have to connect through with maybe some robots, maybe some basically legacy hard code. But generally customers are saying, "Hey, in this modern world I have to be API-led. I actually want everything to be APIs on top of the entire process. " And so that's where we can actually help customers and say, "Hey, look, you're going that route. Modernize everything and make it API-led, but then what are those APIs going to touch ultimately? You want to expose them to agents, LLMs, other cloud applications, legacy applications? " So that's I think how we'd approach it is look, just abstract it a level up and we'll help you get there.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I'm going to say it a little bit different.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I think you're on, the way you just described it, in my mind it makes it less rigid, it makes it more dynamic and you have the ability to be flexible in your organization versus what you can adjust to your business needs, your business KPIs and what you're trying to do for those initiatives. Historically, it was like automation was very much hard coding and it was very rigid. So this is different.

Paul Nashawaty

>> You're monitoring the screen, you're recording it, you're saying, "Hey look, I'm going to install this agent on someone's laptop and then as they do these 10 steps or 20 steps, I'll record it. " But if the developer releases a new push next week, something breaks, I'm out of luck. And so I think that was definitely maybe 10 years ago. People have started to modernize that a little bit more, but everything's changed with what agents can do now too.

Savannah Peterson

>> Totally. - Yeah, well,

Savannah Peterson

>> and that's where the Boomi Agent Studio comes in, right?

Sanjay Menon

>> Yeah, absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Talk to us about it a little bit.

Sanjay Menon

>> Yeah, no, you hit the nail on the head.

Sanjay Menon

>> So the next phase of that is if you think about a traditional automation process, let's just take a sales order, for example, order cash. What would happen is you'd have to monitor when a sales order comes in, basically someone would check and make sure was that actually the pricing that we offered them? Does that fit the discount pricing that we can even offer right now that my CFO told me? Can I push that? Ultimately, do I have the inventory for that? And then ultimately push that back through shipping, et cetera. So there are a lot of human-in-the-loop errors and process that could fall out. What we're seeing now is look, any place where we can take out human error makes a lot of sense for an agent to go in. And so every part of validation upfront, RAG to a policy about your pricing, for example. Next step, have an agent check your ERP and make sure you have the inventory. Continue to go down the process and say at least have agents help us along the way, do the validation, do the checking. And then also anytime there's document movement along there too, we don't need a human to send an e-mail. We just want those agents to push those for us, whether that's file transfer, actual document transfer or APIs.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I'm going to add a little bit to that though.

Savannah Peterson

>> Okay. - I think that there's a little bit

Paul Nashawaty

>> that I think that I want to go out on...

Paul Nashawaty

>> You just totally threw me off there, by the way... Well, when you look at the human part of it, I think it's good. I think but the other side of it also really just is the technical part of it, right? Location. And I'm going to kind of move a little bit out on a limb here and say all right, well, when we look at location and where data's living, data's key, right, tech stack's important, when we look at just say cloud locations, in our research we see that 94% of organizations use two or more clouds, 65% use four or more clouds. And they're not the same clouds, they're across different architectures, they're on-prem, they're in Edge locations, and now you have all these different areas of integration and hell has to work. So that goes back to your core heritage of Boomi, of making things work. But then now on top of it, now it's like okay, location independence. Now you have that going on and now you have this automation that allows you to work across these different ecosystems. I think that's important to kind of call out.

Sanjay Menon

>> It's absolutely right. And when we went down this journey of basically reinventing automation, we went and listened to customers, as we always do. And we talked to some of the largest customers who have this problem. You see varying differences of automation as you go up the scale. But when you look at the largest customers, if you solve their problems, you'll naturally solve the bottom end. And so what we heard from those large customers, they said it does start with integration because you basically start a process by figuring out the data that's important for that process to know, the context of that process needs to know. And that data and context could sit anywhere, like you said. It could be on-prem, could be in cloud, it could be in a SQL database, could be an Excel spreadsheet. But you're absolutely right is when we think about the lifecycle of a process that you want to automate, that can start from any one of these sources and that's what we do best.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. Then enter in AI 'cause now you have the whole AI LLMs and you have different data sources, and that all needs to be harmonized.

Sanjay Menon

>> Absolutely right. You enrich it along the lifecycle so as long as we've one, first onboarded the right data, you take... Another good example I love to talk about is like an employee onboard process 'cause there's so many ways I could mess up. I don't know how many times you've applied on Greenhouse, but then by the time you've finally got your laptop, they probably asked you 10 times over what's your name, address, e-mail, number.

Sanjay Menon

>> Yeah. - There's a huge automation error

Sanjay Menon

>> and none of us, I guarantee no one in IT wants to deal with that either. So we think there's a lot of these processes where you can say, "Hey, let's make sure you get the data from the right place, single source of truth, automate it throughout the whole lifecycle of it, make sure you're checking, mastering that data, and then finally it's all about business outcomes to have a better experience out of it too."

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. And I mean I think there's been an over-index of obsession on the hype of LLMs and some of the instances that we've seen, but it's all about turning insight into action and that's what you guys do. So how are you collaborating with your partners and your community to help them do that, to guide them on that journey?

Sanjay Menon

>> Yeah, no, look, absolutely. I think a lot of what we're doing right now is one, trying to understand, hey, you have dashboards and you have insights. That's going to take you part of the way too. But next step and a lot of what we're doing too, and we also just announced a partnership with QAD, we really want to kind of elevate what we're able to elevate through process intelligence and understand for our customers, figure out where do your processes lie? How can you bring some of those into what Boomi's doing with AI? We can go discover those for you and then ultimately go execute and make those agentic.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's pretty exciting. What are some of the trends you're seeing in agentic in terms of how folks are deploying or what they're automating first? You mentioned the HR processes, but do you have some other use cases you can share?

Sanjay Menon

>> Yeah, look, absolutely. I think kind of order cash, huge process for a lot of our customers. One-third of Boomi's customers are manufacturing, retail, CPG, in that space. They deal with large volumes of data and orders. So huge opportunity there to basically do the validation checks, pricing changes, dynamic inventories. I think there's a lot there that just has opportunity for error that we can automate. We think about, in the HR world, tons of opportunities where you're hitting benefit systems, compliance systems, payroll systems. All that integration work has a lot of opportunities to break along the way. So if you have a full process that hits those, we think it makes sense to make sure you're integrated across all of those first.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And not to mention that those systems

Paul Nashawaty

>> that you just mentioned, they're typically heritage systems. So you're bridging the gap between old and new, right? You're basically taking not just from an automation perspective, but you're saying this is a heritage dataset that might be encapsulated, that might be a system of record that's going to stay there and you have new systems of engagement that need to access that. So now you have the platform that allows for that modernized approach with still retaining your business KPIs and your business running?

Paul Nashawaty

>> No doubt. You see it all the time in inventory, vendor procurement, but if you have an SAP instance that's either on-prem, an air-gapped environment, it's for a good reason going to remain there because some of that code will not be touched and moved and migrated to the cloud. But for those reasons, you want to make sure you can access that, as well as access a lot of your modern cloud applications too and combine those.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, let's also be honest, a lot of those systems were

Paul Nashawaty

>> built a long time ago and some of the staff that built it is no longer around, right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah. - And the organization is-

Sanjay Menon

>> They might be walking around

Sanjay Menon

>> somewhere here. We might be able to find them.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Maybe. But a lot of those organizations are looking

Paul Nashawaty

>> to encapsulate those heritage systems and leave them as is, right? So it's good way to look at the old and new 'cause not everything is a greenfield opportunity. We like to think it is, but it's really not. It's like you have to keep the business running.

Sanjay Menon

>> Yeah, yeah. No, that's a hundred percent right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. So I'm curious, since we were talking about automation, what do you hope the agents automate in your personal life?

Sanjay Menon

>> If I could have my dream, I would wake up in the morning, my espresso would be brewed automatically because it is now figured out, it's connected to my phone, knows when I woke up and by the time I finish my shower, brushing, change, it's ready to go. That's what matters to me most is my espresso intake every morning.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I agree. That makes sense.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's such a lovely analogy. I love my espresso machine and it's a deep love and she's actually getting repaired right now and it's my morning.

Sanjay Menon

>> Mine too. Mine too. - What is the deal man?

Savannah Peterson

>> And I feel like my morning ritual is just totally...

Sanjay Menon

>> The bots are uprising on us.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know, right? Or they know just how critical

Paul Nashawaty

>> they are. They need-

Sanjay Menon

>> Exactly.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Teasing you. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> caffeine today. - All right, Sanjay,

Savannah Peterson

>> I got one final question for you.

Savannah Peterson

>> When we are having this fun conversation at Boomi World

Savannah Peterson

>> 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today?

Sanjay Menon

>> That's a great question. Last year, we actually allowed our customers to use agents inside the Boomi platform. I think this year where they're going to start to actually have access to use those outside their platform with their customers, I'd love to come back next year and have them show customer stories and outcomes about how those agents actually help them show tangible value in their automation process.

Savannah Peterson

>> Awesome, that's great. - Well, we look forward to

Savannah Peterson

>> telling those stories with you. Sanjay, that was great.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Me too. - Thank you so much

Savannah Peterson

>> for taking the time during such a busy week.

Sanjay Menon

>> Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it's a pleasure. And thank you, Paul.

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank all of you for tuning in to our two days of fantastic coverage here at Boomi World 2025 in Dallas, Texas. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.