Boomi World 2026 | Michael Bachman, Boomi

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Michael Bachman

Head of Research

Boomi Innovation

play_circle_outline Launching Boomi’s AI Center of Excellence: Mission to Shift Enterprise Thinking and Accelerate Transformation

play_circle_outline From Integration to Activation: Agentic, Inference-Driven Edge Systems for Contextual, Consequential Data

play_circle_outline World Models Beyond LLMs: Edge-Pipelines, IoT/OT Convergence, and Post-Quantum Security for Automation

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Michael Bachman, Boomi

Michael Bachman

Head of Research Boomi Innovation

In this interview from Boomi World 2026, Michael Bachman, head of research, Boomi innovation, at Boomi, joins theCUBE + NYSE Wired's Gemma Allen to discuss how the shift to agentic AI is demanding a fundamental rethink of enterprise integration and data strategy. Bachman spotlights Boomi's newly established AI Center of Excellence — a cross-functional team tasked with accelerating AI transformation across customers, partners and the company itself. He explains how "data activation" moves beyond traditional integration, making data contextual, clean and conseq... Read more

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What is the Center of Excellence’s purpose, who leads it, and how does it help internal teams and customers transform by connecting technology to business value? add

What does the shift from "integration" to "data activation" mean for large-scale enterprise customers? add

What technology trends do you expect to emerge in the near future, and how should organizations prepare for them? add

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Michael Bachman, Boomi

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Gemma Allen

>> Hello, Boomi community. We are here in the Windy City. It's Boomi World 2026 and the energy here in the conference center is absolutely electric. Joining me now is Michael Bachman, head of the AI Center of Excellence at Boomi. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Bachman

>> Thank you, Gemma. It's good to be here.

Gemma Allen

>> So, tell me, it has been a crazy year since Boomi World 2025. A lot has happened. Maybe let's start there. Fill me in on all that has taken place since you were last on theCUBE.

Michael Bachman

>> Well, since the last time I was here, I would say it's not just electric, it's agentic.

Gemma Allen

>> I love it.

Michael Bachman

>> Everything's going agentic. So much has happened in the last 12 months. So much in terms of where models are coming and going. So much with what we've done inside of Boomi. And as the person who's our futurist and our researcher for the Center of Excellence, nothing could be wilder than what's happened and what's about to happen.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Well, I want to hear what's about to happen. I want your thoughts there, but first, talk to me about the AI Center of Excellence at Boomi. This is a new development, right? You guys did not have this last year. How did this come about and what does the day look like for you and your team?

Michael Bachman

>> Well, it's a wild day. It can mean a lot of change inside of a day, so that's been great. Really, what the Center of Excellence is here to do is help shift businesses, enterprises everywhere, our own business into different modes of thinking. And so, Chris Hollenbeck leads our Center of Excellence and what he's charged to do is really foment change across all enterprises, whether they're our own, our customers, our partners. And we've done an exceptional job, I think, to this point. So, I'm a guy who's a technologist, so I'm concerned with how we're building pipelines, what's happening in the future and all of that. We have others inside the COE that are there principally to be there to show how value connects with technology. And then, also our engineering teams go out and work with customers directly and help them learn how to transform themselves.

Gemma Allen

>> So, this is the full suite of quantitative and qualitative research right frontline on the field with customers. Talk to me a little bit about one of the big changes this year, which is this move from integration to data activation, right? What does that mean for large-scale enterprise customers? Break that down.

Michael Bachman

>> Yeah. So, data activation, as we'll find out from Steve tomorrow, what that means to him, what that means to us as a business. I'll tell you what it is on my watch. What it means is making data contextual, consequential, clean, and basically there so that everybody incurrent. And so, that way we can make data real for the edge. And what I mean by the edge is we're about to go into an era of inference-based agentic systems. All of the innovations are happening out where the action is, not in some lab with a model or some data center that's agglomerating a whole bunch of data and trying to figure out what the next thing is going to be. It's really happening where the customers are using the technology. And so, data needs to respond and be activated for that edge-based or inference-based set of .

Gemma Allen

>> So, we talk a lot about neural networks and we also talk about sovereign AI, right?

Michael Bachman

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> One thing we know though about the world of sovereign AI and the typical customers in that realm is that often these folks were not necessarily front and center of the previous technological waves, right? We think about governments and the cloud transition, they had challenges, right? And a lot of that was because legacy apps could not migrate easily. Talk to me about the world of sovereign AI now. How are those integrations, those opportunities shifting?

Michael Bachman

>> Yeah. So, a lot of shifts. It's not just about AI. It's about data. It's about technology. It's about operations, what's called digital sovereignty. AI is a part of it as well, but we have a whole bunch of issues as a species. And as enterprises who operate as humans, we have a lot of problems with our data. And so, that's one of the biggest challenges that has been the case for sovereignty, how do I keep my data within borders? How do I keep operations on that data within the defined borders that I have that are compliant with the laws and rules and regulations of whatever region or country that my enterprise resides in? One thing that we have done consistently is we have separated where systems are built versus where they run. And a lot of the things that we're doing from a sovereign front are basically having our customers control where their data path is. So, they can have it in whatever cloud, on-premises, in a hybrid situation. They essentially control their data path, which allows them to mitigate risks around sovereignty, so that at least their data is compliant. Additionally, we're setting up different types of systems, so that they can design wherever we have these systems, not only in the United States, but also in Europe and beyond. So, we'll see where we're going with that. But the idea is to give customers control, so they can manage any type of sovereign regulations that come down the pike. We've done that for a while, we're really going above and beyond now.

Gemma Allen

>> Talk to me about what you're seeing when we think about the balance between speed and security. How real is that issue in the field with these customers you talk to every day? And how do you think we solve for this without creating a whole load of risks that we might not be able to respond to?

Michael Bachman

>> Yeah. So, speed and security. I mean, we're all pressured with speed. Security is a necessary thing, we need that too. There's a cat and mouse game going on right now on the security front. And I would say any system that we're building needs to be able to respond rapidly to any threats that are coming in from a security standpoint. That said, there are two different ways I like to look at speed. From the build time and from the execution time. From the build time, we have dramatically increased speed to value. And what folks are going to be learning about tomorrow and the next day here at Boomi World, they're going to see not just some demo, but they're actually going to get their hands on this type of speed to value within the product itself and around the product, I'm really excited about that. We'll talk a little bit about that in a second, but man, I'm really, really jazzed about that. Now, when it comes to speed on execution time, we're also doing some pretty major things and we have some pretty major announcements coming out over the next couple of days as well.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm also stoked. Tell me, what are you looking forward to over the next couple of days? I'm sure you have a lot of colleagues and clients and customers here. You know a lot of people in this room. What should we prepare for?

Michael Bachman

>> Yeah, I think what we should prepare for is a lot of connection between humans.

Gemma Allen

>> I love That.

Michael Bachman

>> So, it's funny, with AI basically being a mirror back to ourselves, because it's essentially scraped data. Generative AI is all scraping words and memes, and pixels, and sounds off of the internet. It's basically a mirror of who we are as a species, right? One thing that I know that unites all of us is this need for connection, and so that is the most exciting thing to me here. Now, what we do with those connections along the way is even more exciting because when a lot of the folks here get to see technology being used at their benefit so they can spend more time with humans and more time understanding how to define and then solve a problem, that's what's going to happen here. That is what's making me excited.

Gemma Allen

>> And Michael, last question. Outside of all of the super exciting developments we're going to hear over the next couple of days, what else are you keeping a close eye on right now in the world of tech? You're a researcher. You're a technologist. It is a wild time out there. What other things do you think about that you weren't thinking about a year ago?

Michael Bachman

>> Well, I was thinking about several of these things a year ago. Now, they're developing. So, I'm thinking about how fast we can get them back into the system, so we can build newer technology that's going to help our customers get ready for what's to come. So, here are a few examples. Number one, world models. Right now we're all stuck on LLMs, LLMs, LLMs. LLMs are great, but we need to do something different with them. Just like your whole brain has different lobes that do different things, your hippocampus does one thing, your cerebral cortex does another, so too do different types of technology. So, LLMs are one type of technology. Another type is world models. These are built for inference types of decision making. So, I think we're going to see a lot of that. Telemetry on IoT and OT convergence, I think we're going to see a lot of that as well. So, edge-based systems are where we're going and I think a lot of these world models are going to help out as we go from understanding what's at the edge to maybe robotic systems and so on. Another thing that I'm also looking at is quantum. Quantum is not that far off in the horizon.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow.

Michael Bachman

>> And so, one of the first instances of quantum is post-quantum encryption. The idea that you're going to have quantum encryption on all devices being necessary. Once the first commercially-available quantum computer comes online within the next, let's call it three to six, maybe seven years from now, if you're not post-quantum encrypted at that point that they come online, consider yourself .

Gemma Allen

>> Wow.

Michael Bachman

>> So, when you're talking about speed and security, this is what I'm also thinking about. The last thing I'm thinking about right now is looking in general at different types of pipelining technology, some of which we're going to see here at Boomi in its current form, but I'm looking forward to the development of some of these technologies that we'll see in the next couple of days.

Gemma Allen

>> Well, Michael, fascinating to chat to you. Really looking forward to seeing what's ahead over the next couple of days. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE.

Michael Bachman

>> Absolutely, Gemma. Thanks for having me.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen. We are here at Boomi World 2026 in the Windy City of Chicago. Energy electric on the ground. Lots of great conversations coming up. Stay tuned.