2167 - Reconnecting with the Physical World in a Digital Age with Boomi's Steve Lucas

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1:05with us right now it is steve lucas steve you are the chairman and ceo of boomi you are found on the web at boomi.com that's b-o-o-m-i.com steve you are also the author of the book in digital imp it's digital impact the human element of ai driven transformation steve it's great to have you. Thank you, Josh. I am thrilled to be here. Yeah. So listen, we're going to talk all about digital impact and we must, given all of the momentum that is taking place right now in AI. Thank you, by the way, for publishing this. But before we get into that, Steve, what are you doing in your free time? What are you passionate about?

1:46What are you geeking out about lately? TVs, movies, film, anything that you're really loving right now? Yeah, well, let me, well, I geek out on cars. I love building, driving, sometimes wrecking. My 25-year-old son and I are working on a passion project of his where we're tearing down a 2001 Acura Integra. He looks at cars from like the year 2000 like I do from 1970. So this is a classic car to him, which is a little alarming. We're currently tearing that thing down to bare metal and we're going to rebuild it back up and And it's going to be his pride and joy. That's what we're geeking out on.

2:26I had a 1986 Acura Integra when I was in the United States Navy. I'll tell you what, that was a great car. And that was, it was a great, it was a great era for that car as well. Yeah. As my, as my son will tell you, all it's missing is twin turbos and about 200 more horsepower. So we'll throw a turbo on there. Yeah. Yeah. But boy, when that when I can tell you, like when that gets done, that that really is going to be a head turner. You know, just, you know, a car of that age brought to that caliber of restoration is going to be really, really fun to drive around. And so fun, fun, fun. Yeah. And it's also nice that you get to do that with your son, which is really cool.

3:08Well, that's the ruse, right? Is like he thinks this is about the car. It's like the whole dad son bonding time thing. Yeah. Were you involved in cars or mechanics growing up? Yeah. I mean, I have loved fixing things since I was just a small boy. And whether that's cars or computers, I built computers with my dad. I did that with my son. And so I think it's just kind of getting out of the world of ones and zeros, the electrons that we all live in, and just getting your hands kind of in something and getting them dirty. It just, it feels good. I want to ask you one more question on this, because this is, I have just been so obsessed with home DIY projects and just everything that I can do.

3:55Restoring my garage, I mean, just all kinds of stuff like that. And there's been so much joy. I've always prioritized this, but not as much as I have lately. and maybe it could just be a stage of life thing or whatever. But, you know, to someone, you know, who might be a fellow business leader out there that is just, you know, they're just working their guts out. Maybe they're getting a little burnt out. What is the restorative, like, what do you get out of this emotionally and from a mental health perspective? Like, how does it help you do better as a business leader in your day job, so to speak?

4:30Yeah, well, it's funny because, I mean, the other thing I do in my spare time, I live in Denver, Colorado, so you can only really do this in the summer anyway, but I actually love gardening as well. I think there's this consistent theme around getting my hands dirty. I just think there's something about reconnecting with the physical world. Our lives are increasingly digital, right? I mean, I'm stating the obvious in 2025. But as we get more and more digital, more and more meta in our lives, I just think there's something deep and meaningful about reconnecting with the physical. So it's just getting your hands in the dirt and growing something.

5:11I mean, it's kind of like when, you know, ever anyone, you go to the beach and you just sit down for a moment and just absorb the energy of the ocean and the wind and the salt air. And it's that reconnection with the physical that matters. That's what recharges my battery. So whether it's working on a car with my son or getting my hands dirty, you know, kind of planting tomato, you know, putting tomato plants in the ground, it just, it just has something deep and useful in there for me. I love it. I love it. Just last night, I planned where we are going to have a bumper crop of Vidalia onions, garlic, turmeric, ginger.

5:50Like I'm going all, I got papaya tree going this year. I'm excited for what, yeah, what fall is going to hold in store for me. Dinner at your house. Yeah. Steve, let's talk about digital impact, the human element of AI driven transformation. As of when this podcast is being published, it has just hit store shelves. It's on Amazon. It can be found at, and I don't know if you have a separate website for it, but I was able to get to it through boomy.com. But let's talk about why leaders need to grab this book and absorb it. Well, first of all, I think that we live in this increasingly digital world where we forget that technology exists to help humans, to benefit us, not to obligate us to more work.

6:45We've been promised for decades that if we just adopt the next thing and the next thing and this application and that application, it's going to make us so productive. but don't we just feel like we're burdened with technology that all of this digital fragmentation the weight of it is breaking our backs i mean i feel like that and there are times when i'm just i'm ready to just like i'm a donkey on the edge i'm ready to flip out when i get yet another millionth email reminding me that i have to go log into a system that i really don't want to log into and go click on a bunch of things that i already forgot about six months ago and i got to go do it all over again, this burdensome technology that was supposed to unshackle us, give us more time, make us more productive, and we're burdened by the process.

7:34So the book, literally the theme is, in this new era of AI, let's get it right this time, and the technology should serve us humans, make us more productive, unshackle us from the burden of technology. So it literally is about the humans behind transforming the world with AI, but more importantly, how we should benefit the world with AI. For leaders that are at the helm of organizations of large groups of people, and there's been some, I'd say, sobering statistics that have been talked about regarding how as much as 60 % of all labor will be directly impacted by AI. And also, it's quite likely that a lot of jobs that are still being done today are just going to be replaced by AI.

8:33If you're a leader of people, what would you be thinking about? And what would you be doing today, knowing that these are just kind of the eventual trends that are happening, not just within this person's company, but industry-wide and just global population-wide? Yeah. Well, first of all, I think that no one would argue that point, that AI is going to either change, alter, potentially replace a large number of jobs. I think it'll take a little bit longer than we ultimately believe. And here's why. Most companies today, they're rushing in like a bunch of kids, putting just strapping a rocket engine onto a shopping cart.

9:16Then they're kind of lighting it and running, right? That's kind of what I see with AI. They're obsessing over these powerful AI models, but totally ignoring the broken foundation underneath. And my message is quite simple, but I believe it's urgent, which is while everyone is chasing these shiny tools, these AI shiny objects, don't be that company. Be the company that is quietly but confidently fixing the digital infrastructure underneath AI, the plumbing, the electrical. You're going to be the company that transforms your industry when you do that. And if you look at the brutal truth that's out there right now, and you just look at what Gartner cites, you know, that right now we're seeing a lot of AI initiatives get started, but then ultimately struggle and fail.

10:06because of the fragmented systems underneath AI. So my counsel would be ensure your systems, your data, your processes are ready. Otherwise, you're just strapping the rocket engine to the shopping cart. Yeah, yeah. Well, Steve, what would you imagine the transformation that would take place? Again, the book is available everywhere. It's Digital Impact. It's published by Wiley. um what would you hope that the transformation that would take place uh from a leader who grabs this book absorbs it and and and hopefully take some action on this what what what's the outcome that you're looking for well the outcome and when we tell stories real human driven stories about ai and digital transformation and digital impact in the book and i'll give you a couple examples like life or death integration.

11:01In Australia, just a few years back when wildfires were devastating Australia across the country, the Australian Red Cross, they faced a crisis because their donation systems, they collapsed under unprecedented volume. But it turns out my company that I work with, Bumi, as the CEO, we helped them scale from 30 to 300 ,000 transactions in under 24 hours. That's the kind of scale you can achieve. If you look at another solution that we were able to bring to bear with the American Cancer Society, they discovered something I think that was just tragic and horrifying, that patients were missing life-saving treatments because of basic coordination failures, like how to get a ride to your chemotherapy treatment.

11:53It seems trivial, but connecting their systems and automating things like ride scheduling, it got patients to the life-saving care that they needed. And even for me, my own personal wake-up call, I'm a type 1 diabetic. I was diagnosed in my early 20s with that. And over the course, I'm 52 now, but up up until getting a life-saving insulin pump and a life-saving continuous glucose monitor, I kind of had to just like wing it. Right. I gave myself up to 10, 15 injections a day. We're talking 50 ,000 injections and my own, you know, kind of sides there. Wow. Over the course of 20 years. And all of that went away when I got connected technology, a sensor that talked to each other.

12:38So I just think that, you know, CEOs today, they have this incredible opportunity to transform their business, but it really starts with the underlying infrastructure. You've obviously given this some thought now. And I think that it's naive for anyone today to predict what life is going to be like five to 10 years from now. But I feel like some of us have some pretty good ideas and guesses that are fun to listen to. Anything come to mind for you? Oh my gosh. Well, I violently agree with Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, just this week, recently he said at a NVIDIA conference, he predicts that tens of billions, with a B, AI agents will be our coworkers all over the world.

13:26I firmly believe that. I think in less than 12 to 24 months for every one Josh or one Steve, there's going to be 10 to 100 AI agents working to make you and me more productive. That's going to happen. So all the tooling that we have today, a platform to manage employees, a platform for expense reports, that whole infrastructure for agents needs to be invented. So agents will exist, products and services to enable those agents to talk to each other, to talk to other systems. All of that is being built right now. And we are at the, we're just at the precipice of some incredible transformation. Josh, you're going to have agents that will come in and tell you things like, well, you're wasting too much time with these sets of meetings.

14:12You're not prepared for this meeting. Let me help you be more productive all the way to agents that will handle things like expense reports for you. And that can't come soon enough. I am ready for it. I, you know, and, And for those of us who are already, it's really interesting. Obviously, you're using a lot of AI-enabled tools as well yourself. How has this, even at your level, have you noticed how it's impacted you personally? Is it impacting your thoughts process? Is it obviously impacting your productivity? You know what I'm really so curious about? How it's going to affect individual humans.

14:54when we have so much access to be able to do things that were so labor intensive in the past. I mean, but, you know, I'll give you just, you know, just such a small example is, you know, with my wife and I, you know, there was a potential sensitive thing that I wanted to ask her about. And it could have potentially turned into something, you know, contentious. And so I went to AI and I got the exact phrasing that I want. And I shared it with her. And she goes, today, I write this. I go, you better believe AI wrote this because I don't want to waste any time, you know, arguing about something with you.

15:30My time with you is so valuable that I don't want miscommunication to stop us from living our best life together. That's one example that I just really, she and I were talking about this. And it's so exciting for me about where our future is going. Well, Josh, you know, I will tell you this. There is not a meeting, including this one, but at work, there's not a call, there's not a discussion where I'm not using AI to better prepare me for that meeting. Before I jump into a meeting, I'll look at my Outlook calendar. I'll take a screenshot of who's attending the meeting. I'll drop that into ChatGPT or Claude, or I'm also trying out a few other AI models as well.

16:15I'll give it the topic of the meeting, and I'll ask it. As the CEO, how can I better prepare for this meeting? How can I focus on the right outcomes? What should those be? And take a look at my team members on LinkedIn. Here's a few discussion documents that we've had on the topic. Help me prepare as a leader to be the most productive version that I can be for this meeting. I do that for every meeting. It has changed profoundly the way I think, because if you think about it, if AI can just make us make a meeting, something that would otherwise seem trivial, 50 percent, forget 50, 10 percent more productive.

16:56How powerful is that? What I believe as a consequence of that, I don't think that AI has just changed how I think about meetings. I think it's changed how I think about the world. I believe that we are headed for the next extinction level event, that LE or ELE that you watch the whatever that asteroid or, you know, movie was with Bruce Willis. We're headed for an extinction level event with businesses. And it's not going to come for disruptive startups. It's going to come for the companies whose competitors can move 100 times faster than them because of what I just talked about all the way to their systems working together seamlessly.

17:35For me, I believe the future belongs to connected companies. The future belongs to companies that can power AI, that's aware of the context of their business. Anything else is just expensive digital theater, and it's just there to look good. You know, I've learned through this whole process, talking to literally over the past two years, thousands of companies that are interested in innovating with AI, that it's not the AI that fails. It's not the algorithms that fail. It's the systems that fail. I will take a company any day of the week with average AI and excellent integration. They will outperform the company that has a cutting edge AI agent, but all the connectivity between their systems, it's broken.

18:24I'll take that every day, every time. Yeah. Steve, your company, Boomi.com, just, boy, we didn't spend enough time talking about what you do at Boomi. Yeah. But just, you know, for our friends who happen to be searching for you and wanted to learn about Bumi, and we've been talking about AI. Obviously, AI is a huge part of what Bumi is doing. But do you mind just giving just a quick thumbnail or just a quick executive overview of who Bumi is and who you serve? Yeah. Well, by the way, so our name, Bumi, it is derived from a Sanskrit word, also pronounced Bumi, B-H-U-M-I. we spell it B-O-O-M-I because you know here in the U.S.

19:05it's easier to say yeah we're boom with an I but boomy literally means foundation or earth and the notion is that everything is connected through the foundation of the earth that we live on the trees the grass the you know the humans everything all life is connected through this beautiful amazing you know kind of mother earth that we have and what we do is we connect everything we're the google translate for business. So when Microsoft doesn't speak Oracle, who doesn't speak SAP, who doesn't speak Salesforce, none of these things talk to each other because there's no incentive for them to talk to each other.

19:42Yet ironically, that's exactly what organizations need is I need all these things to talk to each other, to have some level of standard, to the lingua franca. Bumi is that. We enable every system to seamlessly connect with every other system in your business. And it is the very connectivity, that connective tissue that organizations don't think about, right? They think about putting a brain in a jar. Well, that's great. You're only missing muscles and nervous system to act on anything, but that's exactly what we are. We're the nervous system for your business. We can integrate and automate every single application database and process in your business.

20:23Excellent. The book, congratulations on the launch, is Digital Impact, the Human Element of AI-Driven Transformation. It is available everywhere. The website, boomi.com, B-O-O-M-I.com. You can get the book by searching on Amazon or anywhere, or you can likely find it through boomi.com. Steve Lucas, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Josh, thank you. absolutely amazing. And I love what you do. I'm going to tune into every single podcast. Thank you.

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