In 2019, Gartner predicted that two-thirds of iPaaS vendors would not survive past 2023. This watershed moment has arrived: traditional, code-heavy iPaaS solutions with fragmented code bases and inelastic architectures are dead. “GenAI-native businesses will outcompete legacy organizations within five years, reimagining every operational process that can be augmented or automated by GenAI,” according to Gartner1. To stay in the game and win, Tray.io believes every company will need to evolve into an Autonomous Enterprise — empowering teams to build integrations and automations using AI; infusing AI into every business process; continuously improving processes using AI; and deploying intelligent knowledge agents that have the ability to iteratively learn about a domain and perform tasks. Businesses that shift to the Autonomous Enterprise will thrive in an environment where expectations for efficiency, velocity and agility are rapidly accelerating. The company today announced its vision to be the catalyst for every organization to become an Autonomous Enterprise.
Rich Waldron, co-founder and CEO of Tray.io, explains, “AI is the nail in the coffin for legacy iPaaS. Every organization, in every industry, is going to reimagine every one of their business processes. AI-infused processes will become the norm — not the exception — leaving behind companies that couldn’t break free of the constraints of their integration technology. The autonomous enterprises of tomorrow will count on next-gen, AI-augmented iPaaS as the backbone of their AI strategy, delivering trusted, intelligent business processes faster to proactively improve every aspect of business performance.”
Tray’s modern architecture makes it easy for companies to composably, collaboratively and continuously integrate, automate and transform every business process using AI to unlock hyper-efficient agility and growth. To support this vision, today the company also announced new AI-augmented capabilities in the Tray Universal Automation Cloud, including API Management, a high-velocity connector development kit and an advanced Tray Build user experience. These new platform capabilities are designed to facilitate composable development and simplify full lifecycle development and ongoing management across all Tray platform capabilities, including process automation, data integration, API management, stack connectivity and ecosystem activation.
“This is an unprecedented time of change, as IT executives are undertaking comprehensive re-evaluations of every business process and all of the software that supports them,” said Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group. “The connection between the transformative power of AI and a smarter, more autonomous business is clear, yet organizations are facing a gap in AI expertise that is hampering execution velocity and leaving business teams at risk of losing control of their own AI-centered reinvention. A next-generation, API-first iPaaS has the promise to be the foundation of the enterprise AI strategy where IT teams quickly and collaboratively infuse AI into every integration, automation and workflow across the enterprise stack so they can rapidly turn AI into competitive advantage and business value.”
A Shift from Rigid Processes to AI-driven Continuous Improvement
The rigid iPaaS architectures used by most enterprises today have been around for 20 years. They cannot support automation at scale without huge operational overhead and heavy developer lift. Even then, they only produce static integrations that quickly fall out of alignment with the business. Outdated builder experiences are not designed to easily infuse AI, and IT teams have to battle with throttled delivery models, fragmented codebases and frameworks that make it impossible to use AI for continuous process improvement.
“AI is expanding who can build workflow automations; it is 10x-ing how fast developers, business technologists and teams can collaborate and compose apps; and it’s empowering enterprises to shift from static processes to responsive, continuously improving ones,” continued Waldron. “What’s more, AI is presenting a once-in-a-career opportunity for the IT leader to transform their entire enterprise and have a controlling hand in overall business success.”
AI-centric iPaaS Unlocks the Autonomous Enterprise
To successfully become an Autonomous Enterprise, an organization must centralize on a next-gen iPaaS solution built for the AI era and use it as the epicenter of its AI strategy. This becomes the control center for end-to-end business processes where precise decisions can be made about where and how to infuse AI for the best business outcomes.
“Now that data is connected and can be manipulated and moved with low code, AI can suggest and act on improvements for a business,” stated Alistair Russell, co-founder and CTO of Tray.io. “By giving intelligent knowledge agents access to the full picture and the ability to affect change, the Tray Universal Automation Cloud is uniquely positioned to service these agents at scale in the same way it does for the human workforce today, while still providing organizations the visibility to ensure correct data governance and compliance.”
Given the flood of AI products and features on the market, business and IT leaders must think strategically about how they implement AI. According to the 2024 AI Implementation Strategies in the Enterprise survey, also announced today, 73% of organizations report that more than half of their SaaS apps offer AI capabilities or AI-augmented features, and 40% state that the primary focus of their organization’s AI implementation strategy over the next 12 months will be building strong integrations between their internal SaaS apps and AI. Their primary intention is to improve process efficiency, boost employee productivity and increase customer satisfaction.
“While enterprises are optimistic about the potential of AI, they need to look critically at exactly how they are implementing and managing these features. Is IT now an AI referee that has to decide which AI recommendation ‘wins’ over the others? Without a next-generation iPaaS at the epicenter of the enterprise AI strategy, attempting to manage the multitude of AI features across the SaaS tech stack will turn into a right mess,” stated Waldron.
Augmented development will touch every part of the software development lifecycle for integration, automation and app development. According to Gartner, “By 2028, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI coding assistants, up from less than 10% in early 2023.”2
To help organizations evolve at the right pace for their business, Tray.io’s product roadmap is focused on delivering the four keys to autonomous operations:
- Composable and AI-augmented development – Every step in the iPaaS development process can benefit from AI-augmentation to significantly boost operational efficiency. To accomplish this, a platform must provide rich, role-based conversational experiences geared toward business technologists, integration specialists and managers, each with an experience tailored for the way they work — from assistance building repeatable enterprise integrations to acting as a digital assistant for managers and front-line workers to execute automations on-demand. The Tray Universal Automation Cloud is powered by Merlin AI, a unique platform-level intelligence layer that infuses AI into every experience from augmented development to on-demand, chat-first automation.
- Automation, integration and apps that are infused with AI – Key to the AI iPaaS revolution will not only be the ability to easily incorporate a wide range of LLMs — OpenAI, Llama 2, Claude, Gemini — but also to ensure they can continually update their integration flows with the ever-changing AI landscape and avoid LLM lock-in. By incorporating AI into processes, enterprises can finally make better data-driven decisions, including revamping internal processes and identifying new use cases across customer service, finance, marketing and sales.
- AI-powered continuous process transformation – As enterprises shift to automation at scale, they have the opportunity to tap the vast data within their processes and apply predictive and prescriptive AI to achieve process reengineering recommendations and revolutionize operational effectiveness. However, to achieve this, organizations need a unified platform that enables them to easily harness their process-related data, versus battling with data silos that result from fragmented legacy technology.
- Foundational trust, governance and elasticity – Rigid, pre-serverless architectures are not flexible enough to support autonomous AI-driven workloads. Enterprises require a single, neutral platform across their AI and enterprise stack in order to easily adapt their processes to include ever-changing and emerging AI technologies. A single platform approach ensures strong security; audit trails; elastic scalability; and extensive governance and controls around data, model training and use of LLMs in processes that span both business and IT. This ensures enterprises can collaboratively innovate with confidence across the enterprise tech stack from cloud to on-premises.
According to Waldron, “The route to business agility and competitive advantage is best navigated with an autonomous-first mindset. The Tray Universal Automation Cloud is the onramp CIOs can take today to put their organizations on the path to the Autonomous Enterprise.”
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