Agentic AI and BOAT: The Future of Business Automation

With the recent leaps in AI technology, automation is no longer just about executing predefined tasks—it’s about intelligent, adaptive decision-making. The world of business automation itself has also been rapidly evolving, as identified by the emerging umbrella of Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT) like orchestration platforms and RPA tools.

This convergence of agentic AI and BOAT is set to redefine how enterprises automate, optimize, and scale operations. Read on to learn more about these new market movements and how to capitalize on the future of autonomous technology to solve business challenges.

With Orkes Conductor’s workflow orchestration capabilities and AI Agentic framework, businesses can leverage AI-driven process automation while maintaining human oversight to ensure excellence at scale.

What is agentic AI?

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can act autonomously—make decisions or take action—to achieve a certain goal. It marks a departure from traditional AI that rely on static rules and algorithms to AI systems that are goal-driven, self-adaptive, and capable of independent decision-making. Unlike rule-based automation, agentic AI can interact dynamically with its environment, making intelligent choices based on context, real-time data, or evolving objectives.

Key features of agentic AI

• Decision-Making: Analyzes data, predict outcomes, and perform long-term planning for the best course of action
• Context Awareness: Processes, understands, and responds to dynamic changes around it
• Self-Improving: Able to continuously learn from past experiences to improve accuracy over time.
• Interactivity: Able to collaborate with other AI systems, automation tools, and human actors when necessary.

BOAT and the automation landscape

Identified by Gartner, Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT) encapsulate the rising wave of automation technologies like RPA (robotic process automation), BPA (business process automation), low-code application platforms, iPaaS platforms, and unified orchestration platforms.

While each group of BOAT tools offers different capabilities, it points to an eventual consolidation towards a Unified Application Platform that can:

• Design, orchestrate, and automate processes and applications end-to-end
• Provide execution reliability at scale with built-in tolerance
• Offer enterprise connectivity with any type of service or integration
• Eliminate silos with a collaborative experience for both business and technical users

Such platforms enable enterprises to automate complex processes across multiple services and teams while ensuring scalability, reliability, and governance. With the rise of AI capabilities, such unified BOAT tools will also facilitate AI-driven decision-making in business processes, unlocking synergistic collaboration between AI agents and humans.

The future of automation is agentic AI and BOAT

The combination of agentic AI and BOAT empowers enterprises to move beyond rudimentary automation and adopt intelligent workflows with built-in human supervision. This allows businesses to:

• Deploy AI-driven orchestration: AI-driven agents can dynamically initiate and monitor workflows.
• Enhance workflow dynamism: AI agents can leverage real-time data and historical insights to adjust automation sequences automatically.
• Automate complex decisions with multi-agent collaboration: Different agents can handle specialized tasks within a workflow, ensuring seamless execution and process optimization.
• Incorporate humans in key decision points: BOAT tools provide mechanisms for human intervention, allowing for manual review, approval, or judgment when necessary.

Where traditional automation struggles with unexpected variables, agentic AI and BOAT allow AI agents to make real-time adjustments, request human intervention when necessary, and learn from exceptions for future optimization.

Orkes AI and Conductor: Powering the next generation of intelligent automation

Orkes’ AI-driven orchestration framework, built on Conductor, allows businesses to create AI-powered workflows that dynamically adapt to evolving business needs while maintaining human oversight where needed. With AI Agentic capabilities and Conductor’s Human Task feature, enterprises can:

• Deploy AI agents to drive business workflows with embedded human checkpoints.
• Ensure compliance and governance by allowing humans to review key decisions before proceeding with the automated flow.
• Use hybrid workflows where AI automates routine tasks, but human intervention remains available for strategic decision-making.

Use cases for agentic AI, BOAT, and humans in the loop

1. Customer Support Automation: AI agents autonomously handle customer queries, escalate critical issues, and update CRM systems dynamically. However, a human agent can intervene when needed to ensure customer satisfaction.
2. Supply Chain Optimization: AI-driven orchestration manages inventory restocking, logistics routing, and demand forecasting, but human reviewers can approve strategic supply chain decisions.
3. Fraud Detection and Compliance: AI continuously monitors transactions for anomalies and triggers workflows for investigation while compliance teams review flagged cases before final action is taken.
4. IT and DevOps Automation: Self-healing infrastructure powered by AI agents that detect failures and orchestrate remediation workflows while allowing IT teams to step in when system-critical decisions are required.

The convergence of Agentic AI and BOAT marks the next phase in enterprise automation, where AI-driven agents orchestrate workflows with the flexibility of human involvement whenever necessary. With Orkes and Conductor at the forefront of this evolution, businesses can unlock unprecedented levels of efficiency, agility, and intelligence in their automation strategies while ensuring reliability and accuracy through built-in fault-tolerance, governance, and human-in-the-loop decision-making.

The future of automation isn’t just automatic processes—it’s autonomous systems with intelligent design.

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Conductor is an enterprise-grade Unified Application Platform for process automation, API and microservices orchestration, agentic workflows, and more. Try it out using our online Developer Edition sandbox, or get a demo of Orkes Cloud, a fully managed and hosted Conductor service that can scale seamlessly to meet all enterprise needs.