Boomi World 2026 | Dan McAllister, Boomi & Jay Dettling, UKG

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Dan McAllister

SVP Global Alliances & Channels

Boomi

Jay Dettling

GVP Global Partners and Ecosystems

UKG

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Dan McAllister, Boomi & Jay Dettling, UKG

Dan McAllister

SVP Global Alliances & Channels Boomi

Jay Dettling

GVP Global Partners and Ecosystems UKG

In this interview from Boomi World 2026 in Chicago, Dan McAllister, senior vice president of global alliances and channels at Boomi, joins Jay Dettling, global vice president of global partners and ecosystems at UKG, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier and theCUBE + NYSE Wired's Gemma Allen about how their nine-year partnership is accelerating the shift from static workforce systems to real-time AI-driven systems of action. McAllister and Dettling outline how UKG's OEM integration of Boomi creates a frictionless data layer across workforce management, human c... Read more

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How important is your partnership with Boomi, and how is it structured to benefit your customers? add

How is the trend of agents becoming part of the workforce, along with unlocking on‑premises data and Boomi’s runtime integration capabilities, affecting your company’s product approach and your customers’ operations and outcomes? add

How have your teams adapted to a more collaborative, co‑design operating model with partners, and what impact has that had on the partnership and business results? add

How are you approaching the rollout and management of AI agents—balancing new capabilities with compute costs, pricing/expense management, and customer risk mitigation (for example, preventing agents from going rogue)? add

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Dan McAllister, Boomi & Jay Dettling, UKG

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Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to Boomi World 2026. We are coming to you live from Chicago, and we are talking all things the future of enterprise tech. I'm joined by my co-host, John Furrier, and right now we're going to have another conversation on some great partnerships and alliances that happen within the Boomi ecosystem. I am joined by Dan McAllister, SVP of Global Alliances and Channels at Boomi, and Jay Jet Dettling, Chief Partner Officer, Global Partners and Ecosystems at UKG. Welcome guys.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah.

Jay Dettling

>> Thank you.

Dan McAllister

>> Great.

Jay Dettling

>> Thanks for having us.

Gemma Allen

>> I have to say, I love the kind of a blazer look you guys have .

Jay Dettling

>> Yeah, there's a sale on a great plaid apparently.

Dan McAllister

>> He's trying try to outdo me. I'm not sure it's working, but ...

Gemma Allen

>> Well, it's great you're nailing the retro look. So talk to me a little bit about how you guys are feeling. It's obviously you're halfway through or nearly three quarters way through the first day. What's the energy like on the floor and how are you feeling overall?

Jay Dettling

>> Well, I love the energy. I mean, there's so much coming together here. And being able to actually meet with other partners, meet with Boomi, meet with customers, really like the energy. Love the product announcements today. I think it's a really exciting time and I'm just glad that we have this longstanding partnership and we didn't just formulate it. I think we have a lot to build on.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, I think it's been amazing. I mean, for Boomi here, we have all of our customers here. We have all of our best partners here. The opportunity to bring all of them together. And not just the combination of one partner and one customer, it's a combination of partners actually as well. So many of the systems integrators that Boomi works with, same partners for UKG as well. So we're talking strategy, we're talking innovation, we're talking about how we deliver more value to the market. It's been phenomenal.

John Furrier

>> Actually, go ahead.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, it's been a year of a lot of change, right? A lot has happened in just one year. I mean, and if we think about what's probably likely to happen in the next year, it's somewhat crazy to just even imagine. But maybe talk to me about the partnership that you both have forged. And I guess in terms of your go to-market strategy on both sides of the house, how things are building, changing, shifting in the last year that's gone by.

Jay Dettling

>> Yeah. I would say the partnership with Boomi is really, really important for us and the way we've structured it. We deliver solutions and it's really leveraging data. I mean, we focus on the workforce, we focus on human capital management and we focus on payroll. All of those are so central to data. And the way we formed the partnership with Boomi, we make it really simple for our customers. So we OEM Boomi so that the whole process is very frictionless. And what I also think is important about the partnership that we build together is we both know the expertise that we bring to bear. So there's no confusion, and we make it really simple for our customers.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah. I'll just add to that. We have such a long history, as Jay mentioned before, this partnership has been in place before the two of us ever entered these two companies. So we inherited something great from our teams already. Nine year history, thousands of clients between us.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow.

Dan McAllister

>> And laser focused on how we deliver value. So it's been a lot of fun.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. I put a star next to this on the calendar when I saw you were coming on because agents are workers. They are the workforce. They're becoming the workforce that's in the roadmap. That's clear as day. There's no debate on that. Also, the unlock of data that's not yet in the models are on premises in the data itself. So you've got two things going on in your world. You got the workforce is changing, CHROs are now involved in token decisions. Budgets, CFOs. You got the CFO and the HR kind of coming together. And then Boomi now has runtime and they have the agility to integrate all this stuff. So how is that playing out for you guys and your customers? Because it's a lot more elevated. It's not an IT project anymore. It's actually real data being applied to the business.

Jay Dettling

>> Yeah, great question. I mean, I'll put it in context. We have 80,000 customers. We have 6.5 million frontline workers we service every day. When you think about an enterprise, 30 to 70% of their expense is the frontline worker if they're in retail, manufacturing or healthcare. And so that's a really, really important part of their business. And together with Boomi, we're really moving our platforms from what I'd call a system of record to a system of action. And so what that allows people to do is actually, when you think about building a schedule for any of those things, that's a very static thing, but real life happens. Someone calls in sick, you have an acute patient, you have a flash sale. Whatever the situation is based on your business, you're going to need to react. And so moving from a system of record to a system of action is so important. And we need to ingest other data sources, not just the data that we manage. And so Boomi really allows us to do that.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. Talk about the impact on Boomi because now your TAM has increased. You now have C-suite engagement, not just CIO and CSO.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, that's right.

John Furrier

>> You have business transformation hitting.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, that's exactly right. I always think about what Jay just said is that the explosion of data, the explosion of applications. We help be the connective tissue to make UKG the center of the universe for the employees that are leveraging that ecosystem. And so it's so important for how employees grow and how they're enabled through the organization, and feeding all of that data is super important. And I can't think of a topic more important today to any of the CISO, is how do I get my employees productive? How do I get them onboarded? How do I keep them efficiently moving through the system and being productive in their organizations?

Gemma Allen

>> So when we think about that move from a system of record to a system of action, it sounds very simple, but we know beneath the hood, that's a complex shift. It takes a lot of great data, great efficiency. Talk a little bit about some of the challenges because there isn't really been a magic wand per se. For some of the legacy challenges that have existed across legacy applications, line of business applications that we know have been running inefficiently for a long time, but there's been problems migrating, upgrading. What are you seeing now? What has fundamentally shifted that makes it so ...

Jay Dettling

>> Well, I think there's kind of a readiness, if you will, with our customers. They're ready to do something different. They're ready to leverage AI. They're ready to leverage automating things in a way they haven't been before. But really, as I think about what's fundamentally important, is they have to have the data in a place where it can be used. And the great part about Boomi is it governs it and it helps us orchestrate some of the agent to agent activities that are important for that. But it does come back to change management with people. So some of the things that we've built, we know we're going to automate some things that they used to do on paper digitally in 10 different ways and then we're going to move to the agent will just take care of it for you. So it's kind of a maturation curve that people-

John Furrier

>> They don't call in sick, but they can hallucinate.

Jay Dettling

>> Yes, they can.

John Furrier

>> So this comes back down to the governance. So the question is, what's the unlock? What are you seeing for value? Where's the value being created?

Jay Dettling

>> Well, for us, I mean, I think most of the value is created with structured data. Certainly unstructured data is going to help people do different activities, but where we're really automating things and making things more efficient, if you will, it's based on the structured data and having real rigor around that. And I often think about, you can simplify it and just make sure the data can be self-serviced. If you've got your data stores in that sort of orientation, you're well on your way to the building blocks to what we're talking about.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah. And I think we haven't talked about yet is that automation and the action that agents can now take. Just as your employees would do, once they see the data, what if they don't ever have to see it? The data can act on itself with an agent directing it, right? Or based on a trigger event that happens, it now sends other feeds to other systems to take action on your behalf. So it's actually doing some of the roles, some of the jobs that we don't necessarily have to have the employees do anymore.

John Furrier

>> One of the things that's come up is like, okay, the agents are a part of the workforce, that makes a lot of sense, is that the domain expertise in areas that you're in, and there are other areas like that too that's mentioned on stage, become huge. What are some of the best practices you guys are seeing with customers around getting their arms around that domain specific, not only data, but also the cultural change going on in the workforce itself. Because if you don't drive the AI, it drives you.

Jay Dettling

>> Yeah.

Dan McAllister

>> Right, right.

John Furrier

>> Or if you're new to it, you're like a 16 year old getting your driver's license. You don't know where you're going to take it.

Jay Dettling

>> I think that's a great point. What we've been really thoughtful about as we're building our capability is not go from zero, since we're going to use that analogy, not go from zero to 60 in day one. Make sure the human can still be in control so they understand, okay, we've just delivered new capability, can I control that? Can I click, accept, accept? So I'm going to serve up decision points and allow the human to click accept, accept. And then pretty soon the trust factor goes up and then they'll say, "Just do it for me." But you have to bring them along. You can't just go from zero to 60 or zero to 100, whatever your metaphor might be. That's what we believe.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> When we think about the governance aspect of this, we know that. One of the things we saw in the demo earlier this morning from Patricia was that there is going to be an element of control, right? We're going to continually root back to what the governance and compliance framework is for any one company and any one practice phase. When you think about that, how do you guys foresee a situation whereby a certain amount of activity is still going to have rogue opportunity? Especially in the world of agents. We know right now that people go home, they use spreadsheets, they upload them into models.

Dan McAllister

>> That's right.

Gemma Allen

>> How do you ever fully control what happens even outside of just the owner of that agent?

Dan McAllister

>> Well, that's where the business logic comes into play. So it's one thing to feed the data, it's one thing to allow an agent to take action, but you have to have this governance in place. And some of that comes from our security and compliance and what maybe Boomi would have in the system to who has access to what based on permissions and rights. The other is there are business rules that UKG has helped customers put in place over the past 10, 20 years that they've been in existence and working with these organizations, and you need to respect that going forward. You can't just let an AI agent decide that on their own because who knows what they've been trained on. So having autonomy is great, having automation is great, but you've got to have it based on the rules that you've put in place for your organization for lots of good reasons, right?

Jay Dettling

>> Yeah. I'll double down if it's okay. I'll double down on that. The governance factor, when we pull in different data sources to compliment the data source we're managing, we have to have that governance follow the data. Otherwise, it makes the system almost unusable.

John Furrier

>> One of the things, you guys said nine years you had this relationship, and if you look at the ecosystem today, the rules are changing a bit. A lot more co-design, collaboration. We're seeing it on our business, people we collaborate with and co-design content which works great. How has your teams flexed on this new operating model of partnering, because there's a lot more value there when you do agree. With what I said, do you agree with that? Or if so, what is the big impact and how's that get results?

Jay Dettling

>> Yeah. I think our relationship, partnership, they're both of those things. We have to be connected at the executive level on the go to-market level and the product level and that takes work. And so it's not really a simple answer. We have to make sure we're connected on all three of those facets and stay aligned. And really I think it comes back to the product roadmap and how we've worked together to make sure we're not overlapping, or if we are, we know why we're overlapping and how we leverage each other. And that's really how we sort of look at the partnership and relationship.

Dan McAllister

>> And I think another unique factor of this particular partnership, it is multifaceted. We are a client of UKG's. UKG is a client of Boomi as well. And so we're allowing ourselves to like open the walls a bit and to be as trusting as possible and thinking about what would we use in our own organizations? How would we adapt to what's going on around us and applying that innovation out to our customers. And so as all of this innovation is coming to market with Boomi and you're hearing these announcements today and yesterday, and even some more tomorrow, you'll start seeing that show up in our joint go to market for sure.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. I love the kill switch. It's come up multiple times here in theCUBE, the notion of seeing an agent that's going rogue, Gemma just mentioned.

Dan McAllister

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> That's actually really a feature people want.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah, that's right.

John Furrier

>> They want to shut that down. There's been talk about reorg-ing agents. Hey, Dan's got too many agents that aren't productive. Jay, you could take his head count.

Dan McAllister

>> That's right.

John Furrier

>> So there's a lot of agentic workforce pieces. Does that show up in some of your customers in terms of how you guys are providing value to them in terms of how they think about managing their workforce?

Jay Dettling

>> Well, if you're talking about the agent workforce, I think we're at early days right now and we have to be really smart as a company that produces software because we're using compute power. And so we have to be really thoughtful about new functions, new capabilities, what that does to the impact. And then how we're making sure we're charging appropriately for that, but also spending and managing our expenses appropriately. That's how we're thinking about it today.

Dan McAllister

>> And when we go talk to customers, what you're hitting on here is not only agents going rogue, but our employees using it in the most cost effective manner, right? And so we've made some announcements today. We're working with UKG on this as well. How do we manage those costs for customers going forward? How do we optimize their use of AI? Now we have data that is supplied via UKG or we're bringing data into it, but the AI you're applying to that, be that from Boomi or UKG or Anthropic or some other vendor needs to be managed and mitigated for your customers. And so we're seeing a lot of demand for that and we're thinking about how we can use that for great effects.

John Furrier

>> That's obviously bring the cost down. You guys are both leaders in the industry. You've seen many waves of innovation. If someone asked you, "What's the biggest change going on right now in AI," how would you answer that? And if they said, "What gaps do you see that we should look at," how should people be thinking about being a frontier leader? Because you guys are on the frontier. I mean, the frontier model, but there's also frontier leaders.

Jay Dettling

>> Sure.

John Furrier

>> You draw on that experience to apply it to the forward looking path. What would you say if someone said what's changed the most now?

Jay Dettling

>> I will focus. I'll take the lead. I would focus on not so much the construction and how you're leveraging AI, but how you think about it, and moving from leveraging insights to working in an environment where everything's real time. So what if everything was real time and you didn't have to manage your business with the reports, but all the data was kind of interacting real time and things were happening and firing off? How would that change your business? How would you staff your projects? How would you deliver your work? How would you produce your units? How would you staff the shop floor, the retail environment? How would you serve patients? It really comes down to, I think you start with your customer. And what if everything was real time? What could you do that you can't do today, and lean into that. So that's how I'd think about it.

John Furrier

>> Good.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah. I think what I would just add to that is what's different this time in this wave and this era of innovation, as opposed to all the other ones that we've seen, and we were talking before all the way back to mainframes. They were, at one time, an innovation that promised to change the world, and they did. But all of those things continue upon each other. There's so much more fear and panic this time around because of the pace, and it's radical change, that much faster, and it is empowering more people to do more things and yet it's not widely adopted across the enterprise in any meaningful way. It's coming, we know that, but it's still not there yet. So like this fear and panic, I think there should just be more calm. There's going to be a lot more opportunity. Will there be change? Yes. Let's not get too .

Jay Dettling

>> It's going to be all right.

Dan McAllister

>> We're going to be okay.

John Furrier

>> Managed chaos.

Dan McAllister

>> That's right. That's right. We've seen this movie before. Yeah, it'll be okay.

Gemma Allen

>> But in that state of fear and panic, which is very much real life, there's also an element of posturing. There's an element of almost being afraid to say how ready or unready you truly are for this agentic era. And we see that all the time, especially across regulated industries where now everyone is a technologist. What are your guys' thoughts and what are you actually seeing on the ground? Take Chronos, for example. We know that there are still many hospitals that are manually uploading spreadsheets for staff availability. That probably hasn't changed overnight and it may not change in the next 12 to 18 months. What do you think is really happening and what really needs to change for folks to be AI ready per se?

Jay Dettling

>> I would say maybe building on what Dan said, I think there's an element of, and I mentioned it, perhaps ask for a little bit more trust. And what I mean by that is if we're talking about a hospital situation, a medical care situation, what if we could meet the patient needs and the people that can provide the care, we can make them come together more efficiently and we're protecting private healthcare data and privacy. So if we're meeting that need but serving the patient's needs more efficiently, and it's a life or death situation, I think that builds a lot of trust. And I think people need to maybe lean in but also accept and then we need to build trust, because that's really, in that situation, what AI can do and what we're trying to do really for those organizations.

Dan McAllister

>> I think that's really key. And maybe that's also adding on to what's different is this switch from enabling a human to move faster but still having the human make the decision, to the trust factor of something doing it for you. And I think we've realized two things. One is we don't have enough data to trust the machine to take over. In certain examples, we are. Maybe we'll allow a car to drive us from point A to point B, but I'm not going to let it make a life or death decision yet. I'm not ready to give that up. So data has come to the front office and we understand we can't trust the machines just yet. So we have to do a better job of helping these systems grow. Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> So final question in the world of doing a better job and doing the best job that you can, talk a little bit what's ahead for you both, like what will this partnership look like over the next 12 months and I guess what are you both most excited about?

Jay Dettling

>> Well, I would start with, going back to something I said, we really want to move from a place of we're a system of record to a system of action. And in order to do that, we need supply chain data, we need real time sales data in a retail environment. We need patient data and a health environment. On and on and on. And I think Boomi's going to be the key for that, enabling that data. But not just helping us get the data, but helping us govern it because that's going to be so important for us to deliver the value that we want. So I'm excited about the potential of us leveraging Boomi to do even more than we've done today, relying on more enterprise data than we touch already.

Dan McAllister

>> Yeah. And I think about it very simply, and Jay said it best before, we have pretty defined swim lanes in this partnership, right? We're the data activation company. They are the best at the line of business for HR and employees. And so we want to see them capitalize on all of the data available out in the market to deliver a great result to the clients that they serve. And so it's a perfect union between us and it's very seamless and we're so excited about the partnership.

John Furrier

>> And the lines of business are hot right now. They're driving, they're the AI builders. They're driving the domains.

Dan McAllister

>> That's exactly right. And so we want to help make that come alive in this line of business function for the end customers.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, gents, love this partnership, love the energy and the even coordinated fashion between them.

Jay Dettling

>> Well, we try.

Gemma Allen

>> Keep it up.

Jay Dettling

>> We try.

Gemma Allen

>> Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE.

Jay Dettling

>> Thank you. Thank you very much.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen. We are here live at Boomi World 2026 in Chicago. We are talking all things the future of enterprise and connected opportunity. Stay tuned.