Boomi World 2026 | AK Denduluri & Chockalingam Subramanian, Tech Mahindra

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AK Denduluri

Vice President – Transformation Advisory

Tech Mahindra

Chockalingam Subramanian

Global Head – Enterprise Integration

Tech Mahindra

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AK Denduluri & Chockalingam Subramanian, Tech Mahindra

AK Denduluri

Vice President – Transformation Advisory Tech Mahindra

Chockalingam Subramanian

Global Head – Enterprise Integration Tech Mahindra

In this interview from Boomi World 2026, AK Denduluri, vice president of transformation advisory at Tech Mahindra, joins Chockalingam Subramanian, global head of enterprise integration at Tech Mahindra, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier and theCUBE + NYSE Wired's Gemma Allen about how intelligent integration is becoming the orchestration layer for AI agents and enterprise data. Denduluri and Subramanian explain why data velocity is now foundational to AI — an agentic layer is only as effective as the speed and availability of the data feeding it. They highl... Read more

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How do you view the announcements made here—especially around Boomi and AI—and what impact will they have on Tech Mahindra and its customers' ability to scale and accelerate change? add

Why is data-in-motion (data velocity) so important for AI initiatives today, and how do Boomi’s recent announcements—particularly around orchestration and the convergence of data and services—help enterprises accelerate AI and enable data activation? add

What is the architectural shift from APIs and integration to agents, and how realistic and how soon is the prospect of fully autonomous enterprise workflows? add

How are customers approaching AI adoption—are they tackling the hardest problems first or running many pilots, and what are their current priorities (e.g., ROI and operational automation)? add

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AK Denduluri & Chockalingam Subramanian, Tech Mahindra

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Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE coming to you live from Boomi World 2026 here in the windy city. I'm Gemma Allen joined by my cohost, John Furrier and we are talking all things Boomi, the ecosystem, partnerships and opportunities for the future. Joining me now are two folks key to that from Tech Mahindra, AK Denduluri, VP of Transformation Advisory, and Chocka Subramanian, Global Head of Enterprise Integration. Welcome folks.

AK Denduluri

>> Thank you.

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> Thank you very much.

Gemma Allen

>> So I mean, let's kick off. How are you feeling? What's the buzz like out on the floor? Any surprises from the keynote today? Give us your thoughts.

AK Denduluri

>> I think the atmosphere inside is more windy than outside. There's a lot of storm brewing in here. Again, like what we were discussing just before this, the speed of change is awesome. And I think as Tech Mahindra where we are completely based on the scale of speed that we are talking about, so it marries well. So we want to see how we are able to scale our customers with the speed that Boomi is bringing in. So I think we are all excited. We are all gung ho about what's going on here right now.

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> There is a big push or an ask from every customer. AI has become the big buzzword. So everybody's wondered how to accelerate things and how do I do it? That becomes the key question. Everybody wants to do, but how do I do it, that's the question. I think today we got some of the answers again in terms of how that can be enabled through Boomi, especially the new announcement which has come here, the part, especially the orchestrate part of it. I know that is very important. And especially we see a convergence of happening with data and then services intake convergence happening and this is the right time. What has happened here? I think we see that this is going to accelerate things.

Gemma Allen

>> So... Sorry John, go ahead.

John Furrier

>> Big keynote was about Isaac Newton, the laws of gravity and data in motion. We've seen the data at rest, we've seen data at motion with data lakes. Why is the data motion velocity an important factor now?

AK Denduluri

>> So when we are talking about artificial intelligence, for example, it is... Now artificial intelligence is only as intelligent as the availability of data and the speed at which data is made available. So that is why data in motion and data at speed is very vital right now. So that's where I think we see Boomi coming in and playing the right cards for enabling enterprises to... And that's where they've rightly repositioned themselves as the data activation company. So that's where they're making it available for enterprises to stay.

John Furrier

>> And the unlock too, I mean, we've been covering this with the stats. A lot of the on prem, premises data is not in the models.

AK Denduluri

>> Yes.

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> So there's model choice strategy, small language models has been a big part of the thing, but making the platform agnostic to that or enabling that capability. Explain why that's important. What does that mean from a benefit standpoint for value?

AK Denduluri

>> See from a value perspective, again, as I said, for any enterprise to have their agentic layer function to the benefit of their businesses, the availability of data, irrespective of where it sits, whether it sits in enterprise application, a different enterprise application, on-prem, on a cloud, on a data warehouse, I think availability of that and availability of that for the right decision of an agent at the right time is what is paramount. And I think that is where Boomi comes into picture and plays the right game there.

Gemma Allen

>> So Chocka, you said at the beginning there is this excitement, AI is a buzzword, but a lot of folks are like, "How do I do this? What does this actually look like?" Talk a little bit about the architectural shift that's happening from APIs and integration to agents, and how real is this idea of a fully autonomous enterprise workflow practice? How far off are we from that do you think?

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> See, my view to that is that there are aspirations to get into it, and then we need enablers to achieve the aspirations. And what we have seen today are what Boomi is coming up to enable that aspiration. Especially, as we said, the starting point for anything is like we have a old concept called garbage in, garbage out. Okay. That means you're got to have the right data to enable the right output and at a scale, and we see that in a association with Boomi, that is very important that will give a meaningful input because you need to have a data in time to enable the right decision. I think that sort of happens.

Gemma Allen

>> And I mean Tech Mahindra is at the forefront of a lot of enterprises, right? You guys work across a lot of industries and you've been embedded with them for quite a while. Talk a little bit about the low hanging fruit. Like if you were to go home back to Shanghai tomorrow, or back to Dallas, who are the immediate targets for some of these rollouts? What industries are most ready and right for this?

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> I would suggest it's like for everybody, because we are currently into a hybrid integration world. Okay, that is what we have been, but everybody wants to go into that AI-enabled integration. So the potential is there with every customer. So everybody wants to do more in an enable AI-enabled enterprise, and that is what will enable. So for me, if you ask where is the potential, potential is everywhere. Okay, that's what I call it. We cannot say this is a low hanging fruit because it would all depends upon the investment and availability for the particular customer. There are industries which continue to invest and there are something they have their own challenges. So typically if you look at everybody is a potential customer as far as this particular space is concerned.

Gemma Allen

>> Love it. You're a good sales guy, Chocka. Let's talk a little bit about some of those industries that do have additional steps to take, right? Like we know that data is key. We know that getting data in a liquid mode is also key, but that's not something that has necessarily been easy in the past. And there is a skepticism to how easy is that right now. What real challenges and gaps are you guys seeing day to day?

AK Denduluri

>> So if you see it's faster for organizations in the industries where regulations do not really dictate too many terms or where the data regulation is more open, is what I would say. The regulated industries like healthcare will probably take a little while because they still have to make sure that data availability doesn't compromise data. So that is probably the only difference that I see, but otherwise from an applicability, I think as Chocka said, it's applicable to everybody. Availability, yes, there are some industries or some organizations that might have to cross a couple of loops before they get there, while the others are already ready. Maybe a manufacturing customer is already ready. Most of the data is already on a data lake or available across ERPs. So it's about how do we activate it? How do we make sure they draw the benefits out of it, right? I think that's my point.

John Furrier

>> How about the agent ecosystem, because one of the things I like about Connect is that you can manage third-party agents and that's not just API management. It's delegation, there's trust involved. Then you have nefarious agents trying to infiltrate the good agents. It's almost like agent espionage could cybersecurity. There's a lot going on, but the ecosystem is . This is going to have to be a requirement to have agent to agent across boundaries, across companies, across domains. How do you guys see that playing out?

AK Denduluri

>> That's actually coming up as a very important or a keen requirement from many of our customers. It's a problem today, not a future problem, where people are building agents across platforms. Now every platform has their agentic framework and for some cases, let's say for example, I have an SAP instance or on an ERP, they would have agents that would function there better, but how do I govern at an enterprise level? How do I make sure there is efficient coordination? So that is where the agent connect will come into picture. So if you see, we've already been talking since for the last one year as to how agent-to-agent connection with MCPs or the A2A protocol would come in, would really benefit the organization. We are also talking about how do we build agent gardens. I'm talking about agent garden, it's like you have multiple agents performing individual autonomous activity, but there has to be a certain layer of governance and orchestration. Something that we unlocked today in the keynote, right? So these are the kinds of things that we're really seeing from the customer and I think we're getting to a position where we are very rightly poised to address those concerns and requirements.

Gemma Allen

>> So Steve talked a lot today about trust and how important that is in this world. And for a company like Boomi that has had a lot of legacy customers, they've been... Again, you're directly dealing with these folks for a long time That's like one competitive advantage, right? And on the other side, you have these frontier labs, these new, exciting technologies that seem to be kind of leading a certain narrative. What are you guys actually seeing? How are you seeing that hype translate into decisions that are happening on the ground across your customer base?

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> Okay. So what we see is like, typically though there are a hundred things available, it all boils down to the what is the requirement for the customer. The starting point is that. See, typically I give an example to the team also. Nowadays we get cars from multiple features. It's not like I'm going to use all and that may not be required for me. And also it's about the economics, the ROI. What I invest in, I would require return. Any business runs on that. So for me, it's about, there could be hundred things available in the market, but what is going to address my problem statement? I have my own problem statement for my company and I have my own priorities, which is going to address that priority, and what are the combination of skills which I need or in a compounds what I need to make it happen is what things will happen. That's how we see.

AK Denduluri

>> And talking about the trust factor that you mentioned, tying back to the topic of the agent garden that I was talking about, we've been investing quite some energies into building those combination of agents and multiple agents which could be orchestrated. So obviously there would be a need to ensure that the agent that is being orchestrated is trustworthy. So that, in a overly simplistic term, that identity and access management, the trust levels, the security is all very natively needed for this to function smoothly. If you're not able to do that natively, again, we'll compromise with speed. If that is something that we are dependent on as completely external system, yes, speed will get impacted.

John Furrier

>> All right. My last question for you guys, because you guys are close to a lot of the customer use cases with Boomi and enabling that change. What's on their minds? What's the conversation like? How far along are they? What are they leaning into? I was using a car analogy earlier. The car is the tech, the human's the driver. People are driving around like they're 16 years old, crashing into things, but there are good drivers.

AK Denduluri

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> Deterministic workloads are great. Where are the customers heads at? Where are they on the progression? And how do they approach this? Because they're frontier, they're frontier customers using the frontier technology.

AK Denduluri

>> In fact, what we see... Now, we have a very wide range of customers, right? So there are people in various stages of that journey. There are people who are still figuring out and still trying to see how they could really enable an agentic cooperation, also because of all the apprehensions they hold. At the same time, there are customers where they're already pushing the boundaries. They're saying, "Okay, I want to have a complete hands-off operations." And one of the sort of low hanging fruit was the operations, the entire IT operations. How could you bring in AI? How could you bring in agents to make sure my operations is more efficient? So I could repurpose my staff to build and not run. So those are the conversations that are happening. But again, to really answer your question, I think there the bandwidth or the spectrum in which they fall is pretty wide. So they're having a lot of conversations. Yes, we take a lot of learnings from one customer and also share those experiences with others so we could make their journey much more smoother.

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> And though actually, as AK said, the maturity level depends upon the customer . But one thing is pretty common with all is like everybody want to jump onto the AI bandwagon. Okay. There is a clear pressure for... Peer pressure and everything is there with everybody. They want to get into the journey of AI, but some people have a little matured, good thought, and they have been already moved ahead. Some people are starting, but everybody wants to get onto the bandwagon. So they wanted to make utilize this particular moment. They say, as we call in the keynote, this is the defining moment. They don't want to miss the bus. So they don't want to be left behind. Somebody picked up and they don't want to be left behind. So they want to get into this bandwagon, but how and what level is depends upon the . That's how it is.

John Furrier

>> Do they attack the hardest problems first, or they spread the pilots around one will pop up? I mean, there's two optimization paths. One is to kill innovation by having too many pilots. Some go right at the hardest problem, which is revenue, make more money faster.

AK Denduluri

>> In fact, what we've also observed is last year was when a lot of pilots and investments have happened. This year is when the questions of ROI is coming in. So the ability to monetize, the ability to get the ROI, extract the ROI out of their investments is what this year is all about. And I think that is where Boomi's new announcements that we have seen make a lot of sense. In fact, we are ourselves trying to see how we could put this in action for our customers, how the connect would work, and then how do we make sure that their ROI is justified.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, last question. Let's stay on those announcements. It's next Monday, you're back at work. What did you hear this week? What are you most excited about? What is the number one priority for you guys in the relationship with Boomi over the next couple of months?

AK Denduluri

>> My one word answer would be Connect.

John Furrier

>> You like Connect.

Gemma Allen

>> Love it. What about you, Chocka?

>>

Gemma Allen

>> What about you, Chocka?

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> Yeah, I think orchestrate, especially things, we have got more things in place. Now we have to put everything into an order and make it happen. So that's what it is. This organization is about, they have multiple sources, put all things together and do a meaningful outcome. That's what it is.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, I'm going to stay with the bus analogy, folks. Thanks so much for all you do for helping people make that bus. Thanks for joining us.

AK Denduluri

>> Thank you very much.

Chockalingam Subramanian

>> Thank you so much. Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen. We are here live at Boomi World 2026 on theCUBE. I'm joined by John Furrier and we are talking all things Boomi and the future of connected enterprise. Stay tuned.