Why 2026 Is the AI Production Year

Boomi was founded in the early 2000s by Rick Nucci, acquired by Dell in 2010, and then spun out to Francisco Partners and TPG Capital in 2021. Today it powers 30,000+ enterprise customers globally and moves more data per second than the entire Visa card network, times two. What started as an integration platform has evolved into something bigger: the leading data activation company, purpose-built for the agentic AI era.

Steve Lucas took over as CEO in early 2023, just as ChatGPT was about to reshape the entire software landscape. A three-time CEO with nearly 30 years in enterprise software, Steve previously led Marketo through its $4.75B acquisition by Adobe (the largest in Adobe's history at the time), scaled iCIMS into the world's leading talent acquisition cloud, and held senior roles at SAP, Salesforce, Adobe, and BusinessObjects. He's also the author of "Digital Impact: The Human Element of AI Driven Transformation," a book arguing that the AI revolution will stall unless companies fix the fragmentation of their data first.

In this episode, Sophie Buonassisi sits down with Steve at HumanX in San Francisco to unpack why 2026 is the year AI moves from pilot to production, the three diagnostic questions every CEO should ask before deploying agentic AI, and why "change only happens at the speed of trust." Steve also gets candid about the internal protest that erupted when Boomi rolled out its first CSM agent, his prediction that AI will go from influencing 20% of executive decisions to making 90% of them within 2 years, and how he picked up Claude Code on an airplane to vibe-code a contracts agent for his sales team.

If you're a founder, operator, or GTM leader trying to figure out whether your business is actually ready for agentic AI (or just chasing the buzzword), this one is for you.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00  Intro

0:58  Welcome to GTMnow at HumanX

1:10  Why 2026 is when AI moves from pilot to production

2:32  Influencing decisions vs. making decisions: the next 2 years

3:18  Digital Impact: why fragmentation will stall the AI revolution

5:01  "Get your data to the gym": the new slogan

5:20  The 3 questions to know if your company is AI-ready

6:47  Change happens at the speed of trust

7:53  The internal protest behind Boomi's CSM agent

9:32  From integration platform to data activation: the strategic shift

10:50 Steve's most transformative AI workflow as a CEO

11:12 Vibe coding with Claude on an airplane

12:20 Where to follow Steve and Boomi

Host: Sophie Buonassisi, SVP Marketing at GTMnow

linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi  

Guest: Steve Lucas, CEO at Boomi

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nstevenlucas/

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The GTMnow Podcast
The GTMnow Podcast is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with the top 1% GTM executives, VCs, and founders. Conversations reveal the unshared details behind how they have grown companies, and the go-to-market strategies responsible for shaping that growth.

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