World of Workato 2025 | Bhaskar Roy, Workato

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Bhaskar Roy

Chief of AI Products & Solutions

Workato

play_circle_outline Unlocking Business Potential: Introducing 28 Tailored Genies to Enhance KPI Achievement and ROI through Contextual Intelligence

play_circle_outline Workato One platform integrates orchestration with Genies for enhanced functionality.

play_circle_outline Introduction of GO Action Boards for monitoring and enhancing KPIs.

play_circle_outline Customers co-developing custom Genies for specific business needs.

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Bhaskar Roy, Workato

Bhaskar Roy

Chief of AI Products & Solutions Workato

In this conversation from the World of Workato event in Las Vegas, Bhaskar Roy, Chief Product Officer at Workato, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson to break down the major announcements shaping the future of the agentic enterprise. Roy shares details on the launch of Workato’s 28 “Genies” – AI-powered agents designed to drive KPIs by embedding orchestration directly into business processes. He explains how Genies go beyond surface-level tasks by optimizing core workflows in sales, IT and customer support, enabling enterprises to scale automat... Read more

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What are Genies and how do they differ from typical agents in optimizing business processes? add

What are the core features and capabilities of Workato One and its Genies? add

What is the purpose of the Workato GO Action Board and how does it help users monitor and address fluctuations in KPIs? add

What do customers do to tailor their experience with Genies beyond the standard offerings? add

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Bhaskar Roy, Workato

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, Workato fans and welcome back to fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. Delighted to be joined by Rob Strechay here for two days of live broadcast from World of Workato. Rob, we're already off to a pretty hot start today, no pun intended.

Rob Strechay

>> I think so. It's very, very, very warm out, but even warmer in here with the technology, and talking of how Genies, our agents are helping customers really achieve ROI and meet KPIs, which I love.

Savannah Peterson

>> Which is so critical, actually doing things to tell us about all the things that are doing and the fantastic announcements that came out today. Bhaskar, thank you so much for taking the time to join us.

Bhaskar Roy

>> Well, thank you for having me. Truly appreciate it.

Savannah Peterson

>> This has got to be a really special day and week for you and the team. What was it like being in the room earlier today?

Bhaskar Roy

>> Oh my gosh, where do I start? It was just phenomenal. I think you all prep for weeks trying to get there, and when you come in, and the keynote comes out, yeah, we had some hiccups like you do with live demos and things like that. But you know what? The audience just engaged. There was so many folks I could see with their cameras up taking pictures and talking about it even after the break that was there. People were just chatting as to what the announcements were. So at a high level, I think it was well received.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think so. And it was standing room only in there. Absolutely packed. I know I've been talking with the team. Y'all had even more attendance than you were expecting today. Truly, the room is buzzing. You announced a lot today. I would love for you to break down some of the core components of each one of those announcements, but just because I love the word so much, can you start with the Genies?

Bhaskar Roy

>> Yeah, absolutely. So Genies are agents, but the way Genies are different is, if you look at typical agents, people are mainly doing it at the fringes of their organization. Summarize email, create content, et cetera. They are not able to go down to the core of your business process and optimize that. And the core of a business process, if you think about it, it's all drives our KPIs, business KPIs. So genies start with the KPIs in mind. So you define what the KPIs are, you provide with all the necessary context for it to deliver to the KPIs, and then we have this notion of skills, which you can go orchestrate workflows, take action on systems in order to really help you do that. So it does actual work in order to really drive to what are your business KPIs. So we love the Genies as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> And there's 28 Genies that came out today, or well, your customers have been exploring, many of them. I know this is asking if you have a favorite child, do you have a favorite Genie or one that you got to work with a little bit more?

Bhaskar Roy

>> I do have a favorite, but I'll defer to our customers. So this is something that we have been working with customers for the past year or so. And typically where they typically start are they identify what are the key things in their business plan for that particular year. And it breaks it down into three things, most of the time. It's revenue growth, everyone is looking for that, operational efficiency, looking for that, and it's either risk reduction... Actually there's a fourth one, employee experience and customer experience. So these are the four areas that we find most of our customers have the plans around us to what they would do. And the way they start with Genies are starting with one of them. So it becomes a sales Genie or a rep Genie that you would've shown in order to help sales really monitor lead to close, how do they make that efficient? IT Genie to save business costs because it helps them, all the help desk stuff that they need. Customer support is my third favorite as well, or one of my favorites, is mainly because the customer experience that you deliver through those Genies is natural. They understand you, they understand what you're looking for, and they're able to respond in that way with that full know-how, with that context-

Savannah Peterson

>> And with natural language processing, watching that Genie Agent Studio demo today, you're able to communicate in a way that is so natural, it'll allow everyone across an organization to interface with these Genies, right?

Bhaskar Roy

>> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's what we are hoping for. And that's what we see our customers, and internally as well who have deployed it, that's where we are headed. It's just amazing to see.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. And you had a few more things that were announced as well with the Workato One platform going GA and as well with, what was it, your GO Action Boards as well. Why don't you fill us in to kind of answer those questions as well?

Bhaskar Roy

>> Absolutely. Let's start with Workato One. So one of the core things that makes our Genies really great is it can orchestrate workflows. Because if it's not able to do that, why is it there? It's just summarizing things and building on content, which we all know that we can do with ChatGPT. So orchestration becomes a very key part of it. And this is a platform that has been there for the past 10 years, customers have been using a lot. Now this has been agentified so that agents can be a part of that. So Workato One brings together orchestration capabilities, marries it with our agentic capabilities and all the Genies that you saw, the 28 Genies, the G-28 project, as we called it internally, are things that are available to our customers. Think of them as prepackaged agents or prepackaged Genies that they can deploy within a couple of weeks in order to start the process of this. Because that's another thing we hear from our customers is, okay, this is all great, where do we start? And then you have these prepackaged Genies that we can say, okay, these are your criteria. Let's start over here. Let's get your prepackaged Genie, customize it to your specific environment, and then you're off to the races within the next couple of weeks.

Savannah Peterson

>> And then they're also then getting to deploy different Genies and implement those across the board. We heard from Samsara earlier today talking about how the IT Genie was the door that opened it, but now they can use a whole bunch of the different Genies.

Bhaskar Roy

>> Yeah. And we see that in the customers. They start with one, and in a few months, they go to four or five. There are customers who now have a cadence of four to six weeks, they roll out a Genie within four to six weeks, and they're just going what we call wall-to-wall with all the various orchestration in the Genie.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think part of it was also, to your point on starting point, and I think that when people look at it and how they're going to have these digital co-workers, as it would be, and really these Genies helping them, which again, we love the name.

Savannah Peterson

>> We love it. I'm going to be smiling all week every time we say Genies.

Rob Strechay

>> But that's kind of the Workato GO Action Board kind of becoming the starting place where you can go in and it has insights for you. I think that was... Help elaborate on that.

Bhaskar Roy

>> Absolutely. So if we start with the premise that Genies are there to drive KPIs, then the question becomes how do you monitor those KPIs? What are the things, if the KPIs fluctuate, how do you go about it? How do you figure out how to reason and solve for that? That's where Action Board comes in in Workato GO. So typically what we find is, and this is a product that we have just rolled out, so very early stages, at least internally, people start with the Action Board to see, okay, if I'm a sales rep, or if I'm an IT person, I have my own Action Board. I take a look to see what the metrics are, how they're fluctuating. And the beauty of this is if there are certain things that I see that this is not right, I can just click on it and start having a chat with the Genie to figure out what's going on. And then even say, okay, I need you to fix this. And then the Genie then walks that person through in order to get that thing fixed. So just amazing. So that Action Board is like you were talking about, Rob, it's just starting point for pretty much every employee in the company.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. And I think that was part of what I loved because I think this ties in, fosters that culture of innovation within Workato, but within your customers as well. Can you talk about how really that has been almost like a north star for the development of these products as you work with your customers?

Bhaskar Roy

>> Yeah, so I think this goes back, I would say, a couple of years as we started looking at this. There was one thing that we noticed, which was coming out from one of the analysts, where they called it the agency gap. Where they talked about how most of the agents that are getting deployed are in the fringes. They were low agency. They were doing some simple stuff, et cetera. But then on the high agency, which requires you to complex workflows, complex systems to deal with, people were not really going there with the agents. So that became our north star. The moment we saw that research, it was, gosh, people are not getting ROI from this until we go to the core. And that became a north star as to how what we call core agents or Genies, how can we really go there? And that became the premise of this entire thing that got started. And as we are rolling this out, our customers are seeing that as well. They're co-creating things with us, they're co-partnering with us. In fact, a number of our customers build out their own custom Genies for their specific needs, which are not a part of the package. Which is brilliant, right? In the sense, which is great, that they're able to figure this out on their own.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, it says a lot about the developer experience, the creator experience that you've put so much time into, and that's one of the benefits of using a tool like Workato because it's that same cohesive experience across the board. No matter whether they're new to Genies, or they've been using you for years. I think we sometimes forget that there's humans interacting with this and hundreds or thousands of humans interacting with this. There was a really unique tone on stage today that I found wildly refreshing, as someone who's been in the industry far too long, is the focus on people. Every single person on your team and across your partners talked about the collaboration that they've had, the fun conversations that they've had with the team, the desire and goal not to eliminate roles, but to augment and to enhance the capacity of everyone on the team. And even when you and I were sitting here before we went live, you talked about how it's why you wake up in the morning. It's all the wonderful great people that you get to work with. When we're at time when technology is moving so fast, how are you and the team able to do such a great job ensuring that human side of the culture to keep that speed of innovation up, but also fun?

Bhaskar Roy

>> Yeah, that's a great question. I'll attribute the initial part to be luck. Because when we started the company, a bunch of us had worked together in the past. So communication was easy. Culture was easy at that point in time, when you're 10, 50 people or so. But then we got intentional as to how do we really have this kind of a culture of full collaboration, transparency. Everyone is equal, everyone is approachable. And you see that in that. And that's great. And I think... Do I have time for the story?

Savannah Peterson

>> Of course you have-

Rob Strechay

>> Of course you do....

Savannah Peterson

>> time for a story. We love a good story here.

Bhaskar Roy

>> So I'll go back a couple of years. We were down building all this integration automation platform. There were two guys, one in IT, one was a sales engineer. The person in IT was based out of Boston and the sales engineer was in Germany. So Rob, and you know, over there. So they came up with this Genie idea. It was not us. They came up with it. And they said they worked evenings to build a prototype and showed it to us. Can you imagine from the edges-

Savannah Peterson

>> How good did that make you feel?...

Bhaskar Roy

>> of the . And when they showed, light bulbs, right? Whoo, this is the future. And then the teams got formed. In the past couple of years, we have been iterating, innovating with them. But how great is that when some two folks in two distant part of the world coming up with an idea and working nights in order to figure this thing out. It's just brilliant. It shows the culture which is there at Workato, which I just totally, totally love.

Savannah Peterson

>> I can tell. I can feel the energy with you talking about right now. It really is exciting. I'm curious, so you ended up releasing these 28 Genies today, and have been working with your customers on these for a little while. What was that decision process like internally when you were figuring out which were going to be the most important to that core enterprise?

Bhaskar Roy

>> Yeah. So what we did was we picked three. One was in IT, sales, and customer support, the standard thing that you can think of. And we did a small CIO summit in the Bay Area. We called them and we showed them the product. This is what we are looking to do and launch. There were around 30 to 40 CIOs. Everyone raised their hand and say we want to get on this journey with you. And that has been a journey so far. So today, if you looked at the, I'll call out some of the learnings, today when you look at the Genie, when you create the Genie, we have this notion of defining KPIs but also a job description. We didn't have that before. We knew KPIs was important, but how do you really provide Genies and think of Genies as co-worker and give them a job description? So we learned from that, and said, okay, if we write it as a job description, all of a sudden the Genies work better because they know that they have this job to do. And then we of skills similar to human. We train people on skills. You provide them with the skills, you provide them with the context so that they can do the job well. And that's how we conceived this entire idea.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean, it seems like the whole idea that was weaved through the earlier keynotes was the fact of the agentic enterprise, and how your customers are actually transforming that as well. Because I think it's one thing for you to be on board with how Genies are additive, giving those humans superpowers and things of that nature, but it seems like your customers that you said, again, they're raising their hands in the audience there to get on board with it, also see it that way. Because I mean a lot of these things, they can't even hire for those roles anyway. So it's not replacement, it's we need to do better. We want to be able to service their customers even faster. Are you seeing that as one of the big things is that they're leaning in because of kind of the angle you're taking with it, and that you're making it simple for them tying to KPIs?

Bhaskar Roy

>> It is. I think that's a core part of our belief as well. This is not about job replacement or anything like that. We think of them as, just like I was talking about, co-workers. They are there to help augment what you do every day. And I think you heard Vijay on the stage as well. It helps us do higher value work. Everyone says that. But if you look at it from that standpoint, all of a sudden, if all the standard admin minutia analysis work that you have to do on a day-to-day basis, which you spend hours doing, if I have someone who can help me go through that so that then I can evaluate, I can supervise, I can guide, just like you would do as a manager, I can coach and say, "Okay, this is great, but you need to start looking into this as well." So those kind of things become the that we all do. And we all enjoy doing that kind of work rather than I would say all the various grunt work that we have to go through every day.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh gosh, yeah. I'm sitting here just thinking about how bad I want an expense report Genie. What about you?

Bhaskar Roy

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Can y'all work on that like ASAP?

Bhaskar Roy

>> It is happening. I know that that's one of our, it's not in the Genie 28 project, but expense report is another thing. Every sales rep, as you can imagine, anyone who travels, complains about expense report. And it has not been solved. There's so many apps out there, but it's just not easy and natural for people to interact with it .

Savannah Peterson

>> So what happens next? We were joking about that, well, not joking, literally talking about the expense report Genie that we're all begging for here, where do you go from here? What do you hope happens in the next few months now that this is all out in the wild? How has the customer response so far today?

Bhaskar Roy

>> The customer response has been great, Savannah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I believe that.

Bhaskar Roy

>> It's really, really excited about it. So if you look at it very tactically, how do we roll these Genies out that we have built to our customers so that the customers can start taking one of them, making them their own, and go through that entire process. Now, as a part of that, there was another part of the announcement that we did, which was called AIRO, A-I-R-O. And think of them as you conversationally building agents or you conversationally building skills, or anything that you want to do. So you want to make it easier for not just the IT folks or the technical folks to be able to build things, but you and I. And this is people who's a sales ops person, and a customer support person, just like we are doing in Workato. We want to have that, I hate the word citizen development, but in some ways that, where most of the business teams are able to become self-sufficient, but have the security, the guardrails, the governance that is provided by IT, rather than IT always being the builder. Because once we achieve that, the organization just grows exponentially, the amount of agents that kind of otherwise that they can achieve, grows. So all of those things are just goodness.

Savannah Peterson

>> And the solutions that we're able to achieve, I mean, we're entering an era where we're able to solve questions we didn't even know we could answer before. When we think about this kind of Z axis of innovation that we're imparting on, and I think of it as, the term I like to use, is community participation. It's everybody gets to chime in. And I really felt that way watching your Genie demo, and I was thinking, wow, so I could make my own Genie. I know I could see exactly how this would work. And I think that's really inspiring. Taking this a little personal, to start to close us out here, what do you hope that our current technological revolution does for your team, your personal community, family, and friends?

Bhaskar Roy

>> That's a great question, Savannah. I think we are in, it's a cliche term, we are in this AI era. The more we embrace this technology, the better that is. And I'm an optimist, super optimist, so take it with a pinch of salt over here, but I truly think it makes our lives and everything better. If I have to go in, from a personal standpoint, walking through the door, and when I walk in, it means I have three kids. So asking them about homework and things like that. But if I had that information already on my fingertips, wouldn't I have had better conversations with my kids. Rather than just saying that, "Hey, how was your game today? Can you tell me?" Well, I was going to my son who plays basketball a lot saying, "Hey, you won, you scored X many points over there. That was phenomenal. How did you do it? What was it like teaming?" You just start at a different level of conversation even in your personal life. So I would love to have these Genies, which enriches what my family is doing. Not that I want to be a creep watching them all the time. But as I'm walking into the door-

Savannah Peterson

>> No, it gives you context.

Bhaskar Roy

>> It gives me context.

Savannah Peterson

>> It gives you context.

Bhaskar Roy

>> It gives me what happened during the day-

Savannah Peterson

>> Which I think it's really great....

Bhaskar Roy

>> so that I can just have much more quality conversations. So that's at the personal level. At the customer side of things, I think our customers are guiding us throughout this. They all have ideas. We are just helping them bring those ideas to life by providing them with the tools. And also bringing it in a way so that they don't have to worry about the deep technical aspects of it. Let a platform take care of it. So you focus on, here are my business metrics, how can I grow those metrics? What are the key processes that I need to do in order to do my job better? If you focus on those and not worry about the technology, I think it's a win. And I want our customers to be able to get there where they're rolling things out.

Savannah Peterson

>> I have a lot of confidence that you're going to be able to do that. And what a great way to put it. I love that providing the context. Providing context around anything can help us be more empathetic, considerate, conversationalist, no matter the capacity or the situation. I've got one final question for you, Bhaskar. When we're sitting on this news desk this time next year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today? .

Bhaskar Roy

>> I'm choosing my words here intentionally because there are certain things we are building towards in our product roadmap which I cannot disclose yet. But I think we'll see a world where our customers have gone to a very different level. Now, let me break this down a little bit. I think everyone is talking about how SaaS is going to get reduced. Because SaaS, if you think about it, there's a database, there's business logic and UI. The UI people are choosing conversational. I want to chat and do things rather than point, click. Business logic, taken care of by agents. And it's not just in the SaaS. They can go across SaaS .

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely.

Bhaskar Roy

>> So if you look at SaaS, then it just becomes a system of record of stuff. So then the thing that we're working towards is, at a high level, and this is where Workato GO, the other parts coming, is if you don't have SaaS, is this the one app that you go to and it takes care of everything. The agents are plugged into it. You can search for stuff, you can do the work that you do all from one, rather than swivel chairing between so many different apps to go there. That's our vision and how do we make... We have taken a first step towards it. I think I'm hoping that next year when I talk to you, I can actually show you and talk to you all about, this is how every employee in the company start their day. This is what they do. And it's customized and personalized to that environment. So one app that they go to every day.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love it. It sounds dreamy, and I cannot wait to be talking to you about it at World of Workato in 2026. Bhaskar, thank you so much for coming to hang out.

Bhaskar Roy

>> Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> You were a perfect start to our show. And Rob, thank you for the insights and chiming in. We're just going to keep the fun coming.

Rob Strechay

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> For our two days of live broadcast here at World of Workato in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.