‘Customers have gone from AI skepticism to AI enthusiasm in 12 months’: Adaptiv

Customers are now seeing the potential of AI agents, and the focus is turning to data integration and governance.

Customers have moved from AI skepticism to AI enthusiasm in 12 months, and are now poised for AI readiness, according to Nikolai Blackie, CTO and co-founder, Adaptiv.

“The sentiment in the market has changed,” Blackie said speaking to CRN Australia at Boomi World Tour event in Sydney this week.

Organisations want to move forward with strategy and get the right pieces in place, such as governance and change management.

While businesses have a lot more choice about where they deploy AI — from hyperscalers to data platforms, integration partners and workflows — they’re looking to partners to guide adoption.

“We're helping our customers a lot more with enterprise architecture and strategy and helping them build the foundations for how they adopt AI,” Blackie said.

It’s less about selling individual AI products. Instead, it’s working with organisations to lay the foundations — and that now means a robust data and integration strategy for AI.

“Then it’s helping customers put in place governance and change management and adoption plans,” he explained.

ROI is a key component of the AI strategy, but outcomes need to be grounded in business process improvements. “Once we understand existing KPIs and measurements around business process, we can then look at how automation and AI can improve on those processes,” Blackie said.

At that point, the business case can be developed that includes platform costs, number of licenses, run costs and expected savings.

Last year, a lot of the customer engagements involved data ingestion, whereas now Adaptiv is deploying more agents and building out services — taking traditional APIs and recasting those for an agentic experience through MCP (model context protocol).

“We can use an agent to interact with a back-end service,” he told CRN.

One example is a business that can now enable customers to check the status of their order in the back-end of the ERP platform. But this is just the beginning, and the future is agentic AI and multi-agent systems that will handle increasingly complex workflows and orchestration.

“It’s where we're going as an industry, but to get there, we need to prove out single-agent orchestration,” he said.

Organisations will need to master governance, security models, observability and change management in single-agent interactions and then scale across more complex arenas. But Adaptiv also understands there's a real need to keep solutions tightly bound in terms of what agents and this is where it looks to Boomi for governance and observability tools.

“We’ve found that the more complex the solutions, the more difficult it is to reign agents in and you start ending up with rule drift and unintended consequences of the solution,” he explained.

Blackie’s word to describe the current moment in the AI transformation journey is ‘convergence’ — data integration with AI.

“Good AI requires good data and that needs data quality, data platforms and governance because agents can't do things on your behalf unless they've got secured access to data and services,” he ended.