Name: Mani Gill, Boomi
Uploaded: 2025-05-14T22:00:00.000Z
Duration: 17 min 30 s

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More from Boomi World 2025

Mani Gill

SVP, Product

Boomi

play_circle_outline Announcement of Agent Studio and Control Tower feature for developers.

play_circle_outline Role of AI in enhancing productivity and connecting different systems.

play_circle_outline Platform approach for building sophisticated and bespoke solutions.

play_circle_outline Real-world applications of AI in fashion and customization.

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Mani Gill, Boomi

Mani Gill

SVP, Product Boomi

Mani Gill, vice president of product management for AI and data at Boomi LP, joins theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Paul Nashawaty at Boomi World 2025 to unveil the vision behind Boomi’s latest innovation, Agent Studio. The conversation provides a deep dive into how Boomi is combining automation and governance to shape a safer, smarter enterprise future.

Gill discusses how customer-driven design shaped Agent Studio, enabling organizations to streamline workflows and accelerate intelligent automation. With a focus on real-world impact, the conversation... Read more

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What led to the development of Agent Studio and what were some of the core feedbacks from customers that contributed to its creation? add

What considerations were made during the creation of Agents Studio in relation to governance and control of various agents? add

What are the challenges and benefits of transitioning from development in silos to a unified platform approach? add

What was the timeline for the development of Agent Studio and how long has the team been working on this project? add

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Mani Gill, Boomi

Savannah Peterson

>> Good evening, Boomi fans and welcome back to Dallas, Texas. We're here at Boomi World 2025, wrapping up day one of our two days of power packed coverage here. My name's Savannah Peterson here bringing you all the excitement with Paul. You're still bringing the energy, look at you. You're over here nodding, smiling.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I'm ready to go.

Savannah Peterson

>> You're stoked. And I know you're very excited about this-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Absolutely....

Savannah Peterson

>> next conversation that we're going to have with Mani about the Agent Studio. Lots of announcements going on with y'all this week. Tell us, we're going to dig in.

Mani Gill

>> Awesome. Well, great to be here, and hopefully I can bring the energy as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> So far, so good.

Mani Gill

>> So far, so good. So Agent Studio is something that came out of a lot of feedback and planning from our customers. When last Boomi World, we released a set of our first six agents and now we've got 33,000 in deployment. And one of the core feedbacks that we got from our customers is that, "Hey, this is great. It's helping us make our development easier, documentation easier, but how can you help me up-level my workflows and make them agentic, use this AI thing to automate my business better?" And that's where Agents Studio was born. Now, as part of building Agents Studio, having gone through a API sprawl, having gone through data sprawl and application sprawl, we decided there's going to be a lot of agents and we're also going to build in governance through this product now that's called the Control Tower. And as we started to imagine it from a product perspective, we said, "We're not just going to stop at Boomi agents that our developers are going to build, but we're going to support every agent out there so that you have a single control plane to be able to manage all your agents." Because who knows, one of these agents might go rogue.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, yeah, this is really great.

Savannah Peterson

>> Not might go rogue, there will be instances in which things go a little wild. So that governance key, that piece is going to be so critical. And I love that that's been such a theme of the show. It's front of mind. It's obviously a very big part of the fabric of everything that you're building right now.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I think that there is a lot of interesting dynamics, the way you shifted up, formally being the Boomi AI Studio. One of the things that we would hear, as we talked about right before we got on was, I cover AppDev, I cover that day zero, day one, day two, and DevSecOps and anything in the CI/CD pipeline. What we were finding just even a few years ago is a lot of different silos in the development and developing agents was basically being done in silos. And because nobody really knew how they interacted with one another. So one of the things I saw, especially at the keynote today, was the Boomi platform really taking off and being that one kind of unified approach. That is what is an overwhelming response from developers. People want their bespoke solutions, but they want a platform approach to deliver it. So I think that's a little bit an area that we can unpack a little bit more on, especially on that. What are your thoughts there?

Mani Gill

>> Yeah, that's a great point. I think the platform aspect to it is really important, but then having this platform open because you need to be able to connect to different systems, to connect to different agents-

Paul Nashawaty

>> Hence the bespoke piece, right?

Mani Gill

>> The bespoke piece. Now the platform, as we started building the Agent Studio, one of the things we quickly realized is that there's a lot of patterns and a lot of richness in the platform that we can leverage. And so, one of the things that Steve showed was the agent step. So the agent step is, so when you think of the platform, the platform provides orchestration, it's got a canvas... Now I'm getting dry throat as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> Sorry, we passed it on to you because it's so dry in this convention center.

Mani Gill

>> So orchestrating your agents is as simple as just dropping it onto the canvas and hooking them up and hooking them up with traditional deterministic processes and these probabilistic processes. So from a platform perspective, we leveraged, "Hey, we've got this orchestration engine, how do we drop agents into it?" The other part of it is an agent is only as good as the information it has access to. And one of the things that the platform provides, the Boomi platform provides is that it provides access securely to information. So when you create your connections to your NetSuites and your Salesforces, we bring that data in, we rationalize it, but not just the access, but the governance. And so when you start building these applications, we see lines of businesses are actually developing their own applications, if there's not those guardrails in place, the applications can go rogue. And so that's where I think this platform approach, having the governance in place to access the right data with the right use cases, it makes a lot of sense.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> And with the security, we've got a lot of data, an exponential amount of data spiking right now with everything that's going on, and these agents are going to be able to access that data. There's little accidents that can happen that are very unintentional. So talk to me a bit about, as you were developing this and the process there, how are you balancing the need for speed with the need for compliance and governance and all the safety measures?

Mani Gill

>> Well, the compliance and governance we just put forefront. So we just said, "Hey, not only we're just going to build it into the design capabilities, but we're going to build a whole product that allows you to maintain and govern. So what that forced us to do is that we had two different teams, control tower team and the agent designer team, it forced the teams to work together because the control tower, in order to provide the governance, had to go to the agent designer team and say, I need you to expose these metrics to me, both design time and observability because my experience won't light up unless you do it. So we built that in from the ground up as we were building it. The second thing is when a developer builds an agent from a security perspective and a guardrail perspective, that's just part of the core experience. And one thing that is unique about our design experience is that we use AI in the background to build the agent. And so when you give it a goal, when you say, "Hey, build me an agent that's going to help me pick my '80s outfit for the Boomi event that's happening on the first night," you give it that goal, it will create a set of guardrails for you. And one of those guardrails could be, "Don't pick any '70s outfits, or, "Pick something appropriate." That's probably a better one. But it will recognize based on that goal and create those guardrails for you. So it's a combination of, "Hey, we've got this control tower that's demanding observability and governance, and then in the design time capabilities as a developer is building this, that guardrails get built into the agent themselves.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's actually a really interesting point that you just made in terms of picking your outfit, for example, the '80s appropriate. I didn't think about this, so I had AI design my nails for the show in all of your colors-

Mani Gill

>> Nice....

Savannah Peterson

>> which I'm really delighted about. And so I thought about it in the positive impact, we're all optimists at this stage, oh, this is going to be really fun. But I didn't think, what if this particular style was offensive to a certain culture, for example, or this color pattern meant something very different to a different community. It's kind of fun to be able to think about it on the other side of that to be able to check that out. Okay, so how long... I know this was a bit of a rebrand and acceleration through the evolution and maturation with you guys. How long have you been working on this? I mean, our agentic... Last year when we were at Boomi World, we were calling them AI chatbots. So how long have you been working on Agent Studio?

Mani Gill

>> Well know Steve coined the word agent, apparently somebody told him he was the first one to actually publicly call them agents.

Savannah Peterson

>> I did not know that.

Mani Gill

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's cool. That's a fun fact.

Mani Gill

>> Ask him about that next time, he's very proud of that fact, by the way.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes.

Mani Gill

>> But we've been working on... Boomi as a team, has been working on the whole concept of AI and agents and productivity for many years before when it was just AI and predictive and algorithms, et cetera. But the whole agent work started before last year's Boomi World, and it has evolved. And it's really customer-driven because the first wave was how do we make those developers more productive with agents? And then now how do we make what they're building more sophisticated that it can do more, but it also is better for their customers.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, you touched on something that out of all the sessions we had today, I don't know, 9 of 10, 11 sessions-

Savannah Peterson

>> Number 10 here.

Paul Nashawaty

>> So a lot of sessions today, you touched on something that I think it's important that we don't gloss over. You touched on the word observability and Control Tower having that observability, that's a big part of this whole process, having a lens on actionable insights that when you see something, you do something about it, that's important. So many organizations are in a very immature state. They can log, figure out, "Okay, well there's things happening." They collect a bunch of data, and then they go, "What do we do with it? We don't know what to do with it." So it's really, there's not automation, which is the next part of this whole process, but there's no automation that says, "Okay, if you see this, you take this action. And now that's something that you're kind of really emphasizing, and I don't think we talked about that at all throughout the day.

Savannah Peterson

>> Very faint whispers, but not yet.

Mani Gill

>> Yeah, I love your example of the nails. What if the Guardrail said, "Hey, make sure that the color is not inappropriate."

Savannah Peterson

>> Right.

Mani Gill

>> Now, you as the user may love that nail color, wouldn't you want to know why it said it's inappropriate?

Savannah Peterson

>> A hundred percent.

Mani Gill

>> And that's observability. And so we want to ensure-

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a great connection on that. I like that. Yeah, yeah.

Mani Gill

>> We want to ensure that we understand what it's doing and why it's doing what it's doing, but also to be able to do that twofold. One for the developer who's building the agent, but also for the user. The user who is going to pick the nail polish is very different than the person who's going to create the agent. But the user also wants to understand how it came up with that answer, why it made that decision.

Savannah Peterson

>> Mm-hmm. And being able to trace that back too, knowing where that data came from to even inform it of that as well, to know how clean that was or accurate that was or anything else.

Mani Gill

>> And it could be the case that it was wrong. And so how do we make that change so the next person gets the right answer? And that's part of it is reinforced learning that comes into the entire environment as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it is, I really love that you went with me down the bandwagon of the nail polish.

Mani Gill

>> I know that's such a great analogy. I'm going to be using that for the rest of the conference. Now we just need to-

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, you can tell everyone to come look at my nails. It will be great.

Mani Gill

>> We need to just now take the AI that picked your nail, polish the agent, and then get the robot to actually paint your nails. That's what we .

Savannah Peterson

>> So it's funny that you say that because, I'm actually going to write an article about this whole experience because it's been kind of fun, but I was thinking, the human in the loop in this case was my nail tech yesterday. And so I was thinking to myself like, "Okay, well how will this... Will it be a machine? Will it be a robot? Will it be like the Jetsons where I just go down a little jet bridge before I come here to an event and that all gets taken care of?" Who knows? It's kind of fascinating. But I do think even just thinking about the patterns we might not recognize,, if I put my hands together, maybe that would be something offensive as well. There's a lot of... There's so many different angles of evaluation that we can get from these decisions now and confidence thereof, as long as we're working with great foundational data to be able to do that. I am very clearly obviously excited about AI fashion. I want to ask you a personal question, Mani.

Mani Gill

>> Sure.

Savannah Peterson

>> What gets you most excited about our future as a human? Weekend Mani, what would we weekend Mani get excited about?

Mani Gill

>> Weekend Mani?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Mani Gill

>> As it relates to AI or just in general?

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, I mean now I want to know both.

Mani Gill

>> Okay.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I was thinking more on the AI train, but now I'd love to hear what .

Mani Gill

>> On the weekend Mani, it's spending some downtime golfing with my two beautiful girls who are gone to school and will be visiting back in the summer, being an empty-nester. On the AI side, I am very excited at work to be able to leverage the AI with my teams to be more productive. So you asked this question of, how long have you been working on this? And I think the underlying statement there is that, "Hey, Boomi has innovated in this space." We're not just talking about it, we're delivering it to our customers. It's GA, it's available to our customers.

Savannah Peterson

>> I mean, it's doing it for yourself internally as well, which is also kind of interesting. Yeah.

Mani Gill

>> It helped me as a product person, organize, synthesize, automate, also close the gap between what I do, my designers do, what my coders do, so we can be much more innovative. From just being a geek at home, I've got an Apple Vision Pro and I talk to ChatGPT on my Apple Vision Pro, do some research and stuff, and then just interesting topics, find out what I should actually watch today on my massive hundred by hundred virtual screen. So, many cool things.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, that is cool. That was great.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, and that also ties back to what we're doing here. I mean, there's a lot of things, just the fact that you were talking about the nails and you're talking about some of the fun things that you do on the weekend, a lot of that historically, it took a developer to write the code to do this, to understand this, where now the end user can go pick the nail colors I want, show me on Apple Vision what I want to do. And your low code platform allows for that.

Mani Gill

>> Yes. And give it a goal.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But the developer productivity is now pushed way higher.

Mani Gill

>> That's right.

Paul Nashawaty

>> But I think it kind of bifurcates the developer community where you have the citizen developer being able to self-service and not have to worry about writing actual code, but do natural language processing like you were talking about. Or you can have a professional developer write code and it's still as equally powerful because the platform allows us to go in either direction.

Mani Gill

>> Absolutely.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Vibe coding.

Mani Gill

>> Yeah, vibe coding, right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. I mean it's like... And then, I mean, I was using Copilot to do this. I uploaded the Pantones for the show palette, thanks to Greg, shout out to Greg for sending all of that over to me ahead of time so that I could do this little experiment, but then I get to be essentially the developer of my nails using NLP to say, "Oh no, I want something a little more creative than that. I want something a little more fun. I want something playful. This is a playful community-focused show." It was such a fun iteration cycle, and it was one of those things where I love that I'm going to be able to talk to so many people about what we do in a way that's accessible because of my fingernails. It's such a-

Mani Gill

>> Very cool. Or your kicks.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, actually my kicks are custom as well. We did it, we got a whole kicks thing. That's how this conversation got started was I was asking for the color palette to pick my shoes, and then it led to the nails and now here we are.

Mani Gill

>> See, there you go. That's how we have fun with AI.

Savannah Peterson

>> So real-world applications, folks, out in the wild being implemented. All right, Mani, I've got one final question for you, because gosh, you're sitting in a really interesting spot within Boomi. You get to have your hands on all the very fun, new, exciting stuff that's happening.

Mani Gill

>> Yes, data and AI.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, exactly right. Well, you can't have one without the other really, at this stage-

Mani Gill

>> That's right....

Savannah Peterson

>> at least in terms of value creation. What do you hope to be able to say when we're at Boomi World 2026 that you can't say today?

Mani Gill

>> I would love to be here with thousands of customers telling their story of how agentic AI has improved and automated their businesses, their workflows, etc. Just a line of people on the stage-

Savannah Peterson

>> We'll just have them come up... We'll just have them-

Mani Gill

>> One at a time, one at a time.

Savannah Peterson

>> A little 90-second soundbite interviews with you and we can have the whole breakdown of how they've achieved their goals. That's awesome.

Mani Gill

>> Yeah. I'm really focused on real, making customers successful with agents and not getting lost in, "Hey, what's the latest protocol?" What's the latest model, etc. Right? How do we actually make this real for our customers, get them off the starting block and deliver value to them?

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it. I look forward to talking about it. Mani, thank you for being here. Thank you for humoring my mani, and now we got to have this conversation.

Mani Gill

>> Aw, thank you .

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank you, Paul. And thank all of you for tuning in wherever you might be. We're here in Dallas, Texas at Boomi World 2025. My name is Savannah Peterson and you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.