Join us for an in-depth exploration of innovations in AI at the AI Agent Builder Summit, featuring insights from Arun Varadarajan, Chief Commercial Officer of Ascendion. Experts Savannah Peterson and Scott Hebner from SiliconANGLE Media analyze how Ascendion transforms application development with its pioneering AI native engineering platform, AAVA Plus.
In this session, Peterson and Hebner discuss their insightful conversation with Varadarajan. They explore how Ascendion uses AI to revolutionize the software development lifecycle, making processes more autonomous and goal-oriented. This discussion is hosted by theCUBE Research analysts, who bring their expertise to the forefront.
Discover how Ascendion's platform facilitates multi-agent coordination and fosters seamless collaboration between various roles in the software development process. Hebner states the platform's capacity to integrate AI insights is set to redefine software deployment in organizations. This analysis covers both the technical aspects of Ascendion's offering and its broader implications for evolving digital labor.
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>> Hello, and thank you for tuning into the AI Agent Builder Summit. This is the Analyst Post Game Show, where we summarize our key takeaways from our very interesting discussion with Arun Varadarajan, the Chief Commercial Officer at Ascendion. Our goal is to highlight the core differentiators of our sponsors and to help you separate the signals from the noise. I'm Scott Hebner, the principal Analyst for AI at SiliconANGLE Media and theCUBE Research, and I'm joined by Savannah Peterson, a colleague and principal analyst here at theCUBE Research and a superstar host that you may have seen many times on theCUBE.net broadcast. Together, we're going to tag team here on what we learned from Arun's interviews. And Savannah and I have been getting good at this over the day here, so thanks again for being here one more time.
Savannah Peterson
>> My pleasure, Scott. I really love learning from all of your insights and all the fantastic guests you had at the summit. You really knocked it out of the park and this is going to be a great conversation.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, we had 20 of them, and I tell you this one, Ascendion is a really interesting company. They are in the space of application development and transforming AppDev with a software development life cycle that is being rebuilt bottoms-up to be an agentic system and it's really fascinating. And so in fact, Tony, if you can bring up our takeaway chart here, the conversation with Arun was incredibly fascinating. He's a visionary and he sees us approaching a time where the software is almost going to be autonomously built by itself and humans are going to be guiding it, not actually developing it and adapting it. And when you see the demos that they showed and you can see what they can do already, incredibly impressive. What they're really focused on here is AI native engineering and their platforms called AAVA Plus. And again, it is a collection, a large collection of AI agents that know how to collaborate with each other all across the software development life cycle, from the business users with run books into the designers, into the developers, the testers, right across that entire software development life cycle. It's all AI native from the bottom-up. Second thing is it's very goal oriented. So when you're a human and you're collaborating with these agents, you're talking about goals, not tasks. Today, a lot of software developers are using generative AI and predictive AI to automate tasks like testing or building requirements documents or even generating code, which they're really, really good at. It's a whole different thing to make informed decisions to create good plans to problem solve. And that's what gets them into this world of, "How do I achieve a goal?" So beyond just good old assistants that are task-oriented. And then again, this notion of multi-agent coordination across all the roles that play in the software development lifecycle and even the different domains including business and finance and actually, IT all coming together. So they have this holistic platform that they're building out from the bottoms-up, that I really think is going to change the nature of how businesses get software deployed within their organizations.
Savannah Peterson
>> Wow, it seems like they're really taking on a lot there. I'm curious to learn a little bit more about AAVA and AI native engineering. How does that differ from traditional engineering?
Scott Hebner
>> Well, I think traditional engineering is you have a software development lifecycle that in many ways, think about it this way, it allows you to plug in different tools and it helps to coordinate across those tools and keep each other informed of what's happening in different tools that tend to be different users. But it's sort of pre-structured and it's about exchanging data. It's not about solving a problem or I have a goal and you start to leverage AI to actually help create the plan and make the right decisions on how to do that. And so if the traditional approach of a software development lifecycle that has these generative AI assistants in them, it's helping you do things better, it's not telling you the right how and why you should do certain things. It's not necessarily a decision intelligence engine. And I think what they're doing here is they're building it AI native up, which, infused with all these agents, that's going to allow this goal-oriented approach.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. To our earlier conversation, it's bumpers on the bowling lane so that you can go faster rather than eliminating or creating different things. The lack of decision making there is really interesting. How big are these guys and what sort of customers are they engaging with?
Scott Hebner
>> They're actually quite big. If you go out to their LinkedIn account, they have over a million followers, so they're a very large and established vendor. They have a ton of customers and they're growing in really impressive ways. And they're moving into this agentic AI space, which I think is going to further accelerate their growth. Let me kind of explain a little bit why, if we bring up, Tony, the next chart. This gets to what we were just talking about, Savannah, about sort of the evolution here. And I probably should have brought this up earlier, but we've had developer automation. What I mean by that, that's the task orientation where you have a software developer, you have a software development team, you're infusing AI with generative AI assistance, let's call it assistance, but it's helping you automate a task. Do it faster, quicker, higher quality, really important stuff. But it's really just a step on the journey. And the next major step is actually infusing greater decision optimization and problem-solving optimization to the actual developers and the team at large. And that's when you start getting into, "How do I achieve this goal? I got to solve this problem. What are the steps should I take?" It comes back with something and say, "Well, what if I did this or what happened?" So you start to infuse through a dialogue on what you're trying to achieve, you create run books, things of that nature. And then the agents can go off and then automate that. So I think the SDLC market is somewhere between that developer automation and the developer decision optimization, which, Ascendion has both of those. But they're also now into the space on the far right of the autonomous workflows among multiple agents and actually, hundreds of agents potentially that are working at all different levels of the software development lifecycle that are supporting different humans across that lifecycle. And where you get to over time here is you have this digital labor, these coworkers, be it infused across pretty much every element of the SDLC. And whether you're a software developer, you're a data scientist, you're an AI engineer, you're a business user, you're the finance guy, you're the customer experience expert, you're all going to be able to participate and you're going to be able to pick up skills that others have because the agents are going to help you do it. And so it's not just about automation and better decisions. Now it's about getting all these people to work together seamlessly to solve problems.
Savannah Peterson
>> That cohesion and collaboration is really imperative, whether the workforce is digital or human beings. And fostering the culture around that, as well as empowering these folks with these type of toolkits, I think is really mission critical.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, it definitely is. And that's where I'm really high on these guys because they just have a vision and they're bringing it to life. And as I mentioned, they have a huge customer base that they're collaborating with to make this a reality. One of the sessions, the customer panel that I did as part of the AI Agent Builder Summit, we had HP. Not HPE, but HP. And they were talking about the power of agentic infusion into SDLC and he was going through some real life impressive ROI and things that they can do now that they couldn't do just a couple years ago. Again, it's another example of transformation from what used to be pre-built, like a software development lifecycle, to what is now dynamically configured and built as you're going through the help of agents. And just another example in this particular domain of how agentic AI is going to change the nature of pretty much everything.
Savannah Peterson
>> It really is. And to your point about, this is a meta way of phrasing this, but you have to be dynamic. And architecting something that you're building that's going to take a long period of time right now, things are changing too fast to do that. You have to be able to be agile and dynamic in whatever it is that you're trying to create, especially as we talk about implementing and deploying thousands of digital friends in our systems. It's a pretty exciting time, I'm curious to see. It'll be fun to watch their journey and I'm glad that you included them as a part of this series. It's pretty cool.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, I'm actually going to be doing a podcast with them coming up, and it's titled, Is Agile Dead? So it's going to be really interesting to-
Savannah Peterson
>> Ooh, I love how provocative that is, Scott.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, I'm telling you, they got a vision. And you're right on your point about everything being dynamic. Whether you like it or not, everything around you is changing all the time, and it's probably changing even faster now. So pre-built, pre-configured things aren't going to work well as we go forward in time, so this kind of stuff's really important.
Savannah Peterson
>> It is.
Scott Hebner
>> Let me bring up another piece of research that I did here at theCUBE Research, and let me kind of just explain this because I think again, this shows the importance of what Ascendion is doing, which they're leading the charge in. The red or orange line is the growth in developers that are going to be using agentic AI, in other words, partnered up with actual agents. And so it's projected that in this year, 2025, about 190,000 of these people are added. This is in the United States, by the way, only. But look, by the time you get to 2030, it's 800,000 developers will be added that are partnering with AI agents, and that's a 36% compounded growth rate. So the trend is absolutely, we are going to pair our so-called development people across the lifecycle with agents and they're going to have, every single person's going to be a little manager of their own agents to help them get stuff done, and the agents are going to know how to talk to everybody across the team. That's what this chart is saying in terms of the growth of actual humans that are going to be charged for doing this. The right is basically saying if you look today, only about 10% of software that's getting built and tested and designed is being done by agentic systems. By 2030, it's projected to be 70%. So look at what Ascendion is doing and you're like, "They're in the right spot." This is where the market growth is going to be, they're going to tap into, I think a huge opportunity as time progresses here in the years ahead.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, wow. It seems like what I'm hearing you say there is if you're a developer wanting to stay ahead of the curve, learn how to engage with our agentic little buddies.
Scott Hebner
>> Yep, you want superpowers and you want continue... There's going to be a race to the skill sets, right? And the more skills you have and the more experiences, so if you're a software developer, you can actually become an AI engineer pretty easily now because you can get little AI agents to help you build the AI stuff. And that profession's going to fuse together, I think. And so I think a big part, and when I was at IBM, I was the CMO and Product Manager for the rational business, which was a software development lifecycle back then. And I can tell you the value of a developer is based on their skills, and you got to keep up in building your skills. And you're not going to be able to do that in the future unless your little own team of agents are going to help you do new things that you couldn't do before. And you'll be able to do them without having to build all the prerequisite skills and go back to school for years and all that stuff. So again, another cultural transformation I think, that's underway.
Savannah Peterson
>> I couldn't agree more with you, Scott, and I think the thing that's going to power a lot of what happens next as we navigate the uncertainty as well as the excitement, is curiosity. So just stay curious, folks, and everything will be all right.
Scott Hebner
>> Yep. As they say, the game is played on the field, not in the dugout. This is not the time to be sitting back and waiting to see what happens. You got to get out and experiment and learn, and like you said, Savannah, be curious. Play around with this stuff because it's going to really speed up, I think.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, absolutely. The dugout or the armchair, in this case. A lot of armchair experts out there, particularly on LinkedIn these days. It's always nice to distill the truth and talk about the real data and facts with you, Scott.
Scott Hebner
>> Awesome. Well, again, I thank you for taking the time to be here. I know you're incredibly busy. Great insights as always, so awesome.
Savannah Peterson
>> Thank you.
Scott Hebner
>> And to our audience, thank you for all tuning into the AI Agent Builder Summit. Make sure you visit the Summit portal on theCUBE.net or our YouTube channel to watch the Ascendion interview. You'll be glad you did. You can also visit the Ascendion portal that is also on the Summit website to access this video, the other sessions, as well as a bunch of materials that I think you'll find very valuable. We'll see you soon again. We are the leader in enterprise tech and analysis. Bye for now.
>> Hello, and thank you for tuning into the AI Agent Builder Summit. This is the Analyst Post Game Show, where we summarize our key takeaways from our very interesting discussion with Arun Varadarajan, the Chief Commercial Officer at Ascendion. Our goal is to highlight the core differentiators of our sponsors and to help you separate the signals from the noise. I'm Scott Hebner, the principal Analyst for AI at SiliconANGLE Media and theCUBE Research, and I'm joined by Savannah Peterson, a colleague and principal analyst here at theCUBE Research and a superstar host that you may have seen many times on theCUBE.net broadcast. Together, we're going to tag team here on what we learned from Arun's interviews. And Savannah and I have been getting good at this over the day here, so thanks again for being here one more time.
Savannah Peterson
>> My pleasure, Scott. I really love learning from all of your insights and all the fantastic guests you had at the summit. You really knocked it out of the park and this is going to be a great conversation.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, we had 20 of them, and I tell you this one, Ascendion is a really interesting company. They are in the space of application development and transforming AppDev with a software development life cycle that is being rebuilt bottoms-up to be an agentic system and it's really fascinating. And so in fact, Tony, if you can bring up our takeaway chart here, the conversation with Arun was incredibly fascinating. He's a visionary and he sees us approaching a time where the software is almost going to be autonomously built by itself and humans are going to be guiding it, not actually developing it and adapting it. And when you see the demos that they showed and you can see what they can do already, incredibly impressive. What they're really focused on here is AI native engineering and their platforms called AAVA Plus. And again, it is a collection, a large collection of AI agents that know how to collaborate with each other all across the software development life cycle, from the business users with run books into the designers, into the developers, the testers, right across that entire software development life cycle. It's all AI native from the bottom-up. Second thing is it's very goal oriented. So when you're a human and you're collaborating with these agents, you're talking about goals, not tasks. Today, a lot of software developers are using generative AI and predictive AI to automate tasks like testing or building requirements documents or even generating code, which they're really, really good at. It's a whole different thing to make informed decisions to create good plans to problem solve. And that's what gets them into this world of, "How do I achieve a goal?" So beyond just good old assistants that are task-oriented. And then again, this notion of multi-agent coordination across all the roles that play in the software development lifecycle and even the different domains including business and finance and actually, IT all coming together. So they have this holistic platform that they're building out from the bottoms-up, that I really think is going to change the nature of how businesses get software deployed within their organizations.
Savannah Peterson
>> Wow, it seems like they're really taking on a lot there. I'm curious to learn a little bit more about AAVA and AI native engineering. How does that differ from traditional engineering?
Scott Hebner
>> Well, I think traditional engineering is you have a software development lifecycle that in many ways, think about it this way, it allows you to plug in different tools and it helps to coordinate across those tools and keep each other informed of what's happening in different tools that tend to be different users. But it's sort of pre-structured and it's about exchanging data. It's not about solving a problem or I have a goal and you start to leverage AI to actually help create the plan and make the right decisions on how to do that. And so if the traditional approach of a software development lifecycle that has these generative AI assistants in them, it's helping you do things better, it's not telling you the right how and why you should do certain things. It's not necessarily a decision intelligence engine. And I think what they're doing here is they're building it AI native up, which, infused with all these agents, that's going to allow this goal-oriented approach.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. To our earlier conversation, it's bumpers on the bowling lane so that you can go faster rather than eliminating or creating different things. The lack of decision making there is really interesting. How big are these guys and what sort of customers are they engaging with?
Scott Hebner
>> They're actually quite big. If you go out to their LinkedIn account, they have over a million followers, so they're a very large and established vendor. They have a ton of customers and they're growing in really impressive ways. And they're moving into this agentic AI space, which I think is going to further accelerate their growth. Let me kind of explain a little bit why, if we bring up, Tony, the next chart. This gets to what we were just talking about, Savannah, about sort of the evolution here. And I probably should have brought this up earlier, but we've had developer automation. What I mean by that, that's the task orientation where you have a software developer, you have a software development team, you're infusing AI with generative AI assistance, let's call it assistance, but it's helping you automate a task. Do it faster, quicker, higher quality, really important stuff. But it's really just a step on the journey. And the next major step is actually infusing greater decision optimization and problem-solving optimization to the actual developers and the team at large. And that's when you start getting into, "How do I achieve this goal? I got to solve this problem. What are the steps should I take?" It comes back with something and say, "Well, what if I did this or what happened?" So you start to infuse through a dialogue on what you're trying to achieve, you create run books, things of that nature. And then the agents can go off and then automate that. So I think the SDLC market is somewhere between that developer automation and the developer decision optimization, which, Ascendion has both of those. But they're also now into the space on the far right of the autonomous workflows among multiple agents and actually, hundreds of agents potentially that are working at all different levels of the software development lifecycle that are supporting different humans across that lifecycle. And where you get to over time here is you have this digital labor, these coworkers, be it infused across pretty much every element of the SDLC. And whether you're a software developer, you're a data scientist, you're an AI engineer, you're a business user, you're the finance guy, you're the customer experience expert, you're all going to be able to participate and you're going to be able to pick up skills that others have because the agents are going to help you do it. And so it's not just about automation and better decisions. Now it's about getting all these people to work together seamlessly to solve problems.
Savannah Peterson
>> That cohesion and collaboration is really imperative, whether the workforce is digital or human beings. And fostering the culture around that, as well as empowering these folks with these type of toolkits, I think is really mission critical.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, it definitely is. And that's where I'm really high on these guys because they just have a vision and they're bringing it to life. And as I mentioned, they have a huge customer base that they're collaborating with to make this a reality. One of the sessions, the customer panel that I did as part of the AI Agent Builder Summit, we had HP. Not HPE, but HP. And they were talking about the power of agentic infusion into SDLC and he was going through some real life impressive ROI and things that they can do now that they couldn't do just a couple years ago. Again, it's another example of transformation from what used to be pre-built, like a software development lifecycle, to what is now dynamically configured and built as you're going through the help of agents. And just another example in this particular domain of how agentic AI is going to change the nature of pretty much everything.
Savannah Peterson
>> It really is. And to your point about, this is a meta way of phrasing this, but you have to be dynamic. And architecting something that you're building that's going to take a long period of time right now, things are changing too fast to do that. You have to be able to be agile and dynamic in whatever it is that you're trying to create, especially as we talk about implementing and deploying thousands of digital friends in our systems. It's a pretty exciting time, I'm curious to see. It'll be fun to watch their journey and I'm glad that you included them as a part of this series. It's pretty cool.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, I'm actually going to be doing a podcast with them coming up, and it's titled, Is Agile Dead? So it's going to be really interesting to-
Savannah Peterson
>> Ooh, I love how provocative that is, Scott.
Scott Hebner
>> Yeah, I'm telling you, they got a vision. And you're right on your point about everything being dynamic. Whether you like it or not, everything around you is changing all the time, and it's probably changing even faster now. So pre-built, pre-configured things aren't going to work well as we go forward in time, so this kind of stuff's really important.
Savannah Peterson
>> It is.
Scott Hebner
>> Let me bring up another piece of research that I did here at theCUBE Research, and let me kind of just explain this because I think again, this shows the importance of what Ascendion is doing, which they're leading the charge in. The red or orange line is the growth in developers that are going to be using agentic AI, in other words, partnered up with actual agents. And so it's projected that in this year, 2025, about 190,000 of these people are added. This is in the United States, by the way, only. But look, by the time you get to 2030, it's 800,000 developers will be added that are partnering with AI agents, and that's a 36% compounded growth rate. So the trend is absolutely, we are going to pair our so-called development people across the lifecycle with agents and they're going to have, every single person's going to be a little manager of their own agents to help them get stuff done, and the agents are going to know how to talk to everybody across the team. That's what this chart is saying in terms of the growth of actual humans that are going to be charged for doing this. The right is basically saying if you look today, only about 10% of software that's getting built and tested and designed is being done by agentic systems. By 2030, it's projected to be 70%. So look at what Ascendion is doing and you're like, "They're in the right spot." This is where the market growth is going to be, they're going to tap into, I think a huge opportunity as time progresses here in the years ahead.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, wow. It seems like what I'm hearing you say there is if you're a developer wanting to stay ahead of the curve, learn how to engage with our agentic little buddies.
Scott Hebner
>> Yep, you want superpowers and you want continue... There's going to be a race to the skill sets, right? And the more skills you have and the more experiences, so if you're a software developer, you can actually become an AI engineer pretty easily now because you can get little AI agents to help you build the AI stuff. And that profession's going to fuse together, I think. And so I think a big part, and when I was at IBM, I was the CMO and Product Manager for the rational business, which was a software development lifecycle back then. And I can tell you the value of a developer is based on their skills, and you got to keep up in building your skills. And you're not going to be able to do that in the future unless your little own team of agents are going to help you do new things that you couldn't do before. And you'll be able to do them without having to build all the prerequisite skills and go back to school for years and all that stuff. So again, another cultural transformation I think, that's underway.
Savannah Peterson
>> I couldn't agree more with you, Scott, and I think the thing that's going to power a lot of what happens next as we navigate the uncertainty as well as the excitement, is curiosity. So just stay curious, folks, and everything will be all right.
Scott Hebner
>> Yep. As they say, the game is played on the field, not in the dugout. This is not the time to be sitting back and waiting to see what happens. You got to get out and experiment and learn, and like you said, Savannah, be curious. Play around with this stuff because it's going to really speed up, I think.
Savannah Peterson
>> Yeah, absolutely. The dugout or the armchair, in this case. A lot of armchair experts out there, particularly on LinkedIn these days. It's always nice to distill the truth and talk about the real data and facts with you, Scott.
Scott Hebner
>> Awesome. Well, again, I thank you for taking the time to be here. I know you're incredibly busy. Great insights as always, so awesome.
Savannah Peterson
>> Thank you.
Scott Hebner
>> And to our audience, thank you for all tuning into the AI Agent Builder Summit. Make sure you visit the Summit portal on theCUBE.net or our YouTube channel to watch the Ascendion interview. You'll be glad you did. You can also visit the Ascendion portal that is also on the Summit website to access this video, the other sessions, as well as a bunch of materials that I think you'll find very valuable. We'll see you soon again. We are the leader in enterprise tech and analysis. Bye for now.
