World of Workato 2025 | Adam Seligman, Workato

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Adam Seligman

Chief Technology Officer

Workato

play_circle_outline Welcome to the Workato Community: Meet Hosts Savannah and Rob and Discover the Vibrant Spirit of Workatians

play_circle_outline Meet Dewey: Workato's New Mascot Symbolizing Accessibility and Understanding in AI, Introduced by Adam in a Fun Shirt!

play_circle_outline Emphasis on Workato's culture of welcoming and approachability for all users.

play_circle_outline Announcement of the Workato AI research lab in San Francisco and its community engagement.

play_circle_outline Leadership emphasis on customer-centric development and collaboration in creating technology.

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Adam Seligman, Workato

Adam Seligman

Chief Technology Officer Workato

In this World of Workato interview, Adam Seligman, Chief Executive at Workato, sits down with theCUBE’s Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay to discuss how Workato is evolving from integration to orchestration by embedding AI agents across workflows, teams and products. Seligman shares insights into Workato’s latest innovations, including genies (agentic automation), the launch of the Workato CLI and the developer sandbox that provides instant access for builders. He highlights how both business users and advanced developers are using these tools to solve real-... Read more

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What is the name of the event being covered in Las Vegas, Nevada, and who are the hosts discussing it? add

What is the significance of the mascot named Dewey in relation to the agentic space at Workato? add

What aspects of Workato's culture and product offerings contribute to a welcoming experience for users? add

What initiatives has Workato taken to advance its AI research and community engagement? add

What is the perspective on the process of developing products in collaboration with customers? add

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Adam Seligman, Workato

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon wonderful Workato community, and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here steaming through day two of our live coverage on theCube. My name is Savannah Peterson, delighted to be bringing you the best stories from both the customer side, as well as the internal culture side with the one and only Rob Strechay. Rob, this has been such a fun show.

Rob Strechay

>> It has. I think it's been such a good mix of Workatos, Workatians?

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh yeah, what is the term? What is the term?

Rob Strechay

>> I'll have to point out the term.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> The customers and the partners, it's just the energy has been fantastic. I think that again, it was just learning about how their journey has evolved with Workato has been a lot of fun.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, no, it has. And speaking of fun, our next guest is definitely going to be fun. Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Seligman

>> Hi, thanks for having me.

Savannah Peterson

>> We're really excited you're here, so much to talk to you about. Before we get rolling, talk to me about your shirt.

Adam Seligman

>> Oh, I got to save the best part for last. It's the exciting time, Workato is really moving into the agentic space, but agents are kind of new and confusing. They can do magic for you, they can help get real things done, but also everybody's sort of figuring out how to build them and what can they do for me. So this is Dewey. So Dewey is our new mascot to celebrate agents, celebrate our genies, our name for agents, and it's just a fun way to kind of celebrate the moment we're in. And tech can be kind of scary for people that are new, this AI stuff's got a lot of mumbo jumbo terminology, so we're just trying to make sure everybody feels like they're welcome here, everybody feels like they can participate, and Workato and Dewey is here to help them get AI done.

Savannah Peterson

>> Is Dewey named Dewey because you can do-y so much with Workato?

Adam Seligman

>> The lines write themselves.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. But the reason I wanted to bring that up is I think that's actually really fundamental to your culture is this sense of welcoming. And Rob and I were on a call with Joe and the team last week, two weeks ago, and we learned about the genie nomenclature, and we love it. It's so nice because I think it makes it feel really approachable and not sterile. I don't know, there's a whole conversation around that. You and I are both big developer fans and we love that community, I can imagine that your wonderful Workato culture creeps out into the developers that get to use your platform as well?

Adam Seligman

>> You know what I love about it, Workato offers after a decade a ton of value to our customers, and it offers something powerful for every kind of user. You could be an expert integration architect and do magic with Workato, or you could be in rev ops and have one problem you want to solve and Workato can solve your problem. And in fact, in the genie demos most of those genie demos, all those genie demos were people in the business that helped build them and they solved their problems, like Patricia's problems, and Maria's problems in revenue ops, and Rishi's problem in challenges in lead generation. So Workato really helps go all the way out to those business users that have the problems, make the technology not so mystifying and complex, and let them actually just get great stuff done and automate their business, and now add agentic and genies on top.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, go for it.

Rob Strechay

>> No, I mean I think what really hits me as well, and I know you had the announcement in the developer side around your AI center of excellence, I screwed up the name of it, but your AI research lab-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, the lab.

Rob Strechay

>> That you're bringing online as well. And it would seem that there's a lot you can do, but there's still room for people who are developers who want to go beyond, and especially when you have to look at the fact that you have the orchestration and you have the integration and a lot of that, it can be easy like you said, citizen developers as well as more advanced developers.

Adam Seligman

>> Yeah. It's just one big idea that motivates us is however you want to do AI, Workato is going to be there for you. And if you're in the business and you're in the demand gen team and you want genies to help you prospect, and find new leads, and get them into your SDR team to help you sell, no problem, you can build genie that way. But if you're an engineer and you prefer to write Python, you can just download some open source, an engineer, she can just go pick it up and start working with it. And Workato is going to be there for her too, giving her for example managed MCP servers because build your agent, don't manage all the identity cruft and access control cruft that sits outside of your MCP server, get managed MCP servers with Workato and then write your agent in the code like she'd like to.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think what you just said is really interesting, you said however you want to make AI work for you. I would actually put that a little, I would push that even further out and say however you want technology to work for you. Because I think when I was looking at the wonderful genie demos that we've seen this week, it's so easy to use that I think some people eventually might not know that that's AI or what that is, they're just going to know they have this little helper and this tool, their Dewey's just going to be there doing stuff.

Adam Seligman

>> Dewey will just do what Dewey does.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, no.

Adam Seligman

>> We've been playing with the lines, they sort of write themselves. Dewey does it and more, so they just keep coming. But that's a state I think we'd like to is the tech could be a tool to get stuff done instead of all this stuff that's in our way of getting this stuff done. So I think that's the spirit. I hope AI really gets us there, it gives us the outcomes, and people I think probably care over time less about how it all works. I don't know how my silicon on my iPhone works, it's like magic, but I really care about what it can do for me.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. And also solving for real problems, that's also been at the forefront of the conversation. I bet that's one of the things that attracted you to come work here. It's so nice to hear that that was Patricia's problem or it was Maria's problem, because oftentimes we see in tech all the time, I'm going to give a field of dreams reference since I spent the summer in Iowa, just because you build it they're not going to come. It doesn't work like that, you have to be able to demonstrate that real business impact right away. What problems are you currently trying to solve with genies on your team?

Adam Seligman

>> Oh, that's a great question. Well we do a lot of agentic code development on my team, so we write core code for our service and stuff. Actually, so one of the things we introduced yesterday was the Workato CLI, command line interface, your viewers probably all know that. But it's a tool that developers can use to manipulate Workato configuration, move recipes in and out, all the control plane operations, it can control your Workato configuration. We actually vibe coded the first version of that.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that.

Adam Seligman

>> It's pretty cool, we beat the CLI. And one of the things that Jasper, the engineer that led that, did was not just build a CLI kind of for the 1973 Unix CLI world, but a CLI that would be used to tool because we did a Replit integration. So the CLI in this case actually, one use case is the Replit agent we'll call the Workato CLI. So okay, how does the CLI show up to make the Replit agent release use? It provides lots of hints with LLM-friendly natural language like you did this, now this next step is probably to do this, and you should pass these parameters, which is exactly what an LLM needs to get that context to know how to use the tool. So we've done a lot of vibe coding, that's been a lot of fun. One of the things that we're, my next things that we're going to tackle, the team is going to tackle is really bring our developer and builder community to life. So we have 600,000 or 700,000 builders around the world, developers of every background, from in the business all the way to hardcore code slinging people. And we want to bring them together as a community. So I want to make sure we really engage them and bring them appropriate content, and also collect their feedback and ideas, and we'll use genies to run those processes for us.

Rob Strechay

>> And you're also bringing out the developer sandbox and really focusing in on how, because we had one of the customers up there and they're like, "Yeah, we started out with the IT genie and that got us 60% of the way there, and then we had to just do the other 40%." But again, it takes out a lot, like you said, a lot of the toil of the different tooling that you have to do the connections to and things of that nature. Talk about the developer sandbox and really how people can get started.

Adam Seligman

>> It's funny, the developer sandbox is to solve one problem. No developer wants to press here to get a lead and have someone call you to get a trial edition. You want to click, you want to log in with your GitHub identity, and boom, you're in. And I want to see what this product actually does. So luckily we've solved that problem, it is 60 seconds to get a new Workato instance for free, 50,000 credits, it's about $1,000 value, like a legit, serious value, and all the features. It's not a crippled product or anything, all the features are in there. So developers can just go rock and roll, build MCP servers, build genies, run Python code outside of Workato that takes advantage of Workato, whatever they want they can go. So it's super exciting to get that out.

Savannah Peterson

>> That is super exciting. Speaking of, I know the AI research lab is a fairly recent announcement, can you tell us a little bit about that?

Adam Seligman

>> Yeah, yeah, thanks. So to really help Workato and help our customers getting the leading edge in AI, we made a couple of investments and we launched our Workato AI research lab in San Francisco. We're in the Dogpatch, so we're right where Illinois and Mariposa Streets come together right next to UCSF and the Chase Center, Uber is there, OpenAI is there, and most importantly the Ramp bar and restaurant is there, super fun place in San Francisco.

Savannah Peterson

>> I've been there many times, yeah.

Adam Seligman

>> Right next to the Ramp, cool place. And this is a space where we're bringing together our AI researchers, our engineering teams, and our community teams, and come together with customers, the developer community and partners. We'll be running meetups, multiple meetups a week, we'll be running journal club for AI researchers. I'm talking to customers, we'll bring customers in to get hands-on and do design thinking exercises with our AI researchers and really figure out the genie and breakthrough AI research needed to tackle their problems. And thanks for bringing up, we also acquired a company, xmad.ai, we just closed the acquisition about 10 days ago.

Savannah Peterson

>> Congratulations.

Adam Seligman

>> Super exciting and brought on some incredibly talented AI researchers that publish in NeurIPS and ICLR, and they're super skilled at some really important areas right now that we think will help us not just be a consumer of LLMs with the weights as they're set from the factory, but really build the models, and adjust, and fine tune, and post-train the models, and even build our own models to help better fit customer needs. And specifically, and this sounds like tech mumbo jumbo, but it's actually a really big deal right now, they have expertise and a bunch of papers published on synthetic data generation. Synthetic data generation is a really big deal. A lot of companies like we're doing this AI and we're going to make sure it works great, and they have a few hundred set of examples of inputs and outputs they want. And that's great to get a rough cut and build a prompt, it's not really enough to have a really robust set of evaluation to know if it's good, and it's not enough to take a model and fine tune it to make a better model, or even do reinforcement learning and really make a highly capable model in their area. So then you're sort of, these companies can be stuck where they're different vendors, but all the vendors are sort of just ChatGPT wrappers or Anthropic wrappers, and so we want to make sure our customers have the levers to go even further. If they have a specific business domain, if they have a specific agent behavior they want, we're going to help them get that into the weights, into the weights so they have an optimized agent. And so it's a great capability.

Rob Strechay

>> Do you see, because I think what I love about Workato, and you and I shared a previous employer where you worked back from the customer, you're always thinking about that. I mean Workato does, we've heard it from every customer. It was always, hey, they're always there to listen to us and things like that. With the weights and the other, the models, and fine-tuning, and you start to look at it, because the orchestration really came from master data management and some of the other things in the integrations, from the iPaaS perspective moving forward it's a true orchestration and now agents. Do you see that this training and the customization, also the customers want this because there's sovereignty, there's different regulatory reasons, and all of these different things that you're hearing from the customers?

Adam Seligman

>> You probably hear this from talking to vendors and customers, but it's a really complex world right now. The technology is moving fast, the business is not waiting for delivery of AI, they want it tomorrow, and it's a complex regulatory environment that we're in. It's super interesting. I think that the answer to the question the root of this is one really important idea, and it's actually the leadership of the company. And the leaders of the company, Vijay Tella, he's why I'm here. I mean this is amazing tech, but it's the people. And Vijay's humility I think sets the tone for the company, and it brings customers really close and customers want to stay customers, and customers move from company to company and they bring Workato with it, the partners come in our ecosystem and they stay with us for a decade. I've known the company for more than a decade since I was at Salesforce, and I really thought highly of Workato then. And the way they've grown is amazing. So I think it really starts from the culture and the humility, and what that leads to is the way we operate our business is we just really bring customers in. Honestly, all the big announcements on the stage yesterday are less exciting because we've been working with customers on them for over a year. There's 80 customers that have had this stuff for a year going hands-on with us. So there's a little bit of whomp, whomp when, we don't hold stuff back, we just develop in a really open way and bring customers in. Every customer meeting I've been in the outcome is like, great, we'll come to your office, we'll sit down, we'll do a whiteboard, and if we don't have what you need we'll put it in the product. And so in a fast-moving world there's a lot of tech innovation, but listening to the customers and just be really humble in your approach I think is super valuable. And that's one of the things that brought me to Workato is that approach.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's something that's really resonated with both Rob and I all week, it is impossible to overstate how lovely your team is and how great the culture is. And I mean Rob and I meet thousands of people all year long every year in sequence, and I really feel like we've been a part of the family for this week. And you can tell, I mean I was so impressed, I think it was Vijay out there yesterday, when he said, "No one at Workato is going to lose their job because of AI, your jobs are just going to all get better." And I just wanted to, I'm going to continue screaming out from the rooftops and talking about you all for a while to come after that because I'm tired of the doom getting proliferated because people are hearing about certain layoffs, or Atlassian just did this kind of creepy thing a couple days ago where they laid off 150 people because of AI, but then were ambiguous with the team and not transparent about why those roles were eliminated. And that doesn't do anything good for our industry, that doesn't do anything good for our progress, and it's so decidedly different at Workato that it is really refreshing.

Adam Seligman

>> It's not our first go-round, like I'm new here but it's an orchestration and automation company. So over a decade ago it started by automating processes. If you were a worker that did a process step-to-step-to-step manually, that would sound really scary and disruptive. Oh no, you're going to automate? But that's not how it worked out, we saw it happen where the people had their processes automated could suddenly add more value, could supervise, could discover new things to tackle, could take those innovations internally and take them externally. Nobody complains we're not triple-stamping paper and pushing it around anymore.

Savannah Peterson

>> Or doing a calculator by hand or any of that stuff.

Adam Seligman

>> I saw a tweet once and it was like, no, I will not fax you the form. We just landed a school bus on Mars. It was like after one of the robots landed on Mars. I feel like that, like yeah, AI will be the same thing. It's going to drive a lot of change, we're all learning to work in new ways, they're spooky good and spooky wrong sometimes, but if we harness them right in genies, and orchestration, and governance we can take on new, give our employees new challenges in new areas. I deeply, deeply believe it, I've seen it, and I think that's what the community is finding.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. All right, I got two final questions for you as we wrap up. In your personal life if you could wave a wand and magically have a genie to take care of something in your life, what genie would you make?

Adam Seligman

>> You know I think the calendaring might be the hardest problem in computer science. I now don't just have a calendar with my spouse and my kids, but it's my dog who needs to have a calendar so we can manage her schedule, it's kind of complicated. You beautiful Bernese Mountain Dog, I love her, but I don't want her to be alone for five, six, seven, eight hours, it takes some intention. So if I have a developer meetup, this is good, the new office, I can bring my dog in. I'm very excited about that.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was just going to say, I can't wait to meet this one.

Adam Seligman

>> I hope she's a fixture at our meetups. There's plenty of room in the new space so I think she's going to like it. It's definitely far enough to throw a ball from one end to the other. But scheduling, I think scheduling and calendaring I think continues to be really, it's the most open problem in computer science. I don't know if you can relate?

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, I can. I think we all can. That is one of the things of like you said, having kids and wife and-

Savannah Peterson

>> Even with just how much we travel, scheduling the dentist sometimes is hard.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, trying to figure out all the different pieces that have to go while you're traveling. And sometimes I'm traveling and my wife is traveling and you're trying to figure out, okay, how does this all come together besides the work-related stuff?

Adam Seligman

>> And then there's the magic moment where my spouse can leave a car at the airport because they arrive an hour before me and I could take it home, that's like magic.

Rob Strechay

>> That would be magic.

Adam Seligman

>> That's optimal. Maybe it's suboptimal.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, maybe.

Savannah Peterson

>> I mean either way having the opportunity for that level of convenience is pretty delightful. All right, final question for you. You're obviously just getting your feet wet at a very exciting time for Workato, when we're hanging out next year, Adam, on this news desk what do you hope to be able to say at WOW 2026 that you can't say today?

Adam Seligman

>> Well I think WOW 2026 will be three times bigger, I'm not exaggerating. We're a company that has super trusted in the process orchestration space, but we're really emerging I think as an influential agentic player in this category that's up for grabs, everybody's trying to figure out, really change how companies work. So the kind of attendees that will be here is going to really grow and broaden, way more developers with our big developer push and we really make it easy to integrate Workato with whatever kind of AI technology a developer wants to work with, but also in the business dimension the different verticals and industries, as genies take off and we seen the success we saw with the customers like Lucid, and Amplitude, and SentinelOne, and we see more and more customers, hundreds and thousands of customers using them, I think it's going to be, well I'm not sure we're going to fit. I'm a little worried about that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Joe's over there listening right now like, oh boy.

Adam Seligman

>> I think it'll really be exciting. And I love a big tent, just personally. I learn a lot with all these people, all these different backgrounds and experiences. And so I think as a learning event it's going to be super, super valuable and exciting, even beyond where we are today.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it, I love it. And you know, I honestly, I really agree with you. I was having a really interesting conversation today, someone was asking me as an analyst what companies do I think are actually doing in agentic rather than just talking about it, and you all are punching above your size I think in a lot of different ways because you were ready for this and you've thought about it from a really smart lens. And I can tell why you joined the company.

Adam Seligman

>> We do-y.

Savannah Peterson

>> What a perfect closing note, oh my goodness. Adam, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy week.

Adam Seligman

>> Thank you so much. Thanks for coming, this is super fun.

Savannah Peterson

>> This is super fun, I'm excited to continue the conversation with you in the future. And Rob, thank you for always being a blast.

Rob Strechay

>> I try.

Savannah Peterson

>> You succeed. And I hope all of you are having as much fun as we're having here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. It's day two of World of Workato here. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.