How a Composable BOAT Solution Helps You Operationalize AI

Last year, industry analyst firm Gartner identified a class of software products they call Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT). These products enable organizations to orchestrate and automate business processes from end to end across many different types of endpoints—including AI tools, services, and agents.

To get the most out of BOAT, you need a composable approach that allows you to combine best-of-breed task automation tools and business applications.

Composability is particularly important when it comes to the use of AI in business processes. A composable BOAT solution enables:

• Modular AI adoption: You can plug in different AI agents, models, tools, and services as needed rather than being locked into a single AI vendor
• Scalable automation: You can start with small AI-powered automations and expand them as AI capabilities mature and your business needs evolve.
• Seamless integration: AI components can interact with the tech stack you already have, including legacy systems and homegrown software, cloud applications, and third-party services.
• Rapid adaptation: As AI regulations, business needs, and technology landscapes change, you can adapt your business processes without overhauling your entire automation infrastructure.

The challenges of operationalizing AI

Unlocking the potential of AI to transform your business operations, improve efficiency, and drive innovation requires more than simply implementing large language models or deploying AI-powered tools. You must operationalize AI by integrating AI capabilities into your end-to-end business processes—whether they’re internal, customer-facing, or both.

Operationalizing AI means using AI where it makes sense. You want to balance automation with human oversight and ensure that AI-driven decisions align with business goals and regulatory requirements. For example:

• A financial services company can use AI agents to detect potential fraud but ensure that cases with uncertainty are escalated to human investigators.
• A customer service department can use AI-powered chatbots to handle routine inquiries while routing complex issues to knowledge workers.
• A marketing team can leverage generative AI to draft promotional emails but require a marketing manager to review them before they’re sent out.

However, operationalizing AI is challenging because:

• Effective use of AI requires an adaptable approach. Many automation platforms have a proprietary, monolithic architecture that doesn’t provide the flexibility or scalability that you need to get the most out of using AI in your business processes.
• Siloed AI leads to fragmented automation and inconsistent outcomes. The excitement around AI tools and services often means that teams have started using them in silos instead of integrating them into processes. This makes it hard to coordinate AI-driven tasks with tasks executed by other IT systems, and makes it hard to ensure that AI has human oversight when needed.
• AI automation often lacks transparency. Many organizations struggle with governance and accountability when AI-driven decisions impact business processes. A lack of transparency makes it hard to measure AI performance, ensure compliance, and mitigate risks.

How Camunda helps you operationalize AI

Camunda is a composable BOAT solution that enables you to operationalize AI in your business. We provide an open, flexible, and scalable approach to process orchestration, so you can:

• Stay flexible. Combine Camunda’s built-in process orchestration and automation capabilities with other tools, services, and systems, including your own AI models and AI services such as OpenAI, Google Gemini, and so on. This flexibility ensures you can add AI to processes in the exact way that makes sense for your business goals without compromising because of technology limitations.
• Integrate AI tools and services seamlessly into business processes. Ensure they work cohesively with other automation technologies as well as with people. Seamless integration means that you can embed AI in processes while maintaining accuracy, efficiency, and reusability, all while preventing siloed AI. As a bonus, it ensures that AI models and tools have access to the full process context, enabling them to make more informed decisions.
• Ensure AI governance through process design, real-time process monitoring, and integrated human oversight. Camunda uses the BPMN process modeling standard and a “one model approach.” That means the visual process model that you design is the same visualization that you see when monitoring processes and when analyzing their performance. BPMN makes it easy to ensure that human reviews and approvals are built into processes where you need them. BPMN also makes it easy to increase or decrease the level of human oversight in a particular process as your needs change.

Learn more

If you’re ready to get started now, check out how to build your first AI agent in Camunda.