Agentic success has a prerequisite — building the systems most enterprises left undone
Enterprises racing toward assured autonomy in agentic AI are running headlong into a decades-old problem: Most of their infrastructure was never designed to be connected — let alone governed at the speed AI demands.
Only about 30% of the enterprise is truly connected today — a fragmentation driven by accumulated technical debt, siloed IT stacks and legacy mainframe systems built across eras that were never designed to speak to each other, according to Dan McAllister (pictured, right), senior vice president for global alliances and channels at Boomi LP. Bridging that gap is now a prerequisite for the agentic enterprise Boomi is building toward — and paradoxically, the very technology creating that urgency may be the only thing capable of meeting it.
“The reason why mainframe still exists is there’s still a lot of value in those systems,” McAllister said. “With the advent of AI, we’re going to see two things: A continued explosion of new applications for technology, and then an increase in the need to go all the way back to the original data sources in the mainframe. Now, that integration — how are we even going to stay at 30%? Well, we’re leveraging AI.”
