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Everyone can build an AI agent today. The hard part isn't getting an agent to answer a question or complete a demo. It's deploying one that employees trust, security teams approve, and operations teams can manage at scale. That's where many AI projects stall. As organizations move beyond experimentation, the conversation shifts from prompt engineering to production readiness. Can the agent safely access business data? Can you evaluate changes before deployment? Can you understand why it made a decision?

Document-centric workflows have been difficult to automate and required human intervention. Attempts to automate document handling often failed or did not scale, because legacy intelligent document processing (IDP) systems were fragile. They often required manually retraining models on dozens of documents just to identify specific fields—only to repeat the process whenever a format changes. The result was a costly cycle of maintenance and manual data entry.

Since its inception, agentic AI has felt like a distant aspiration. Today, agents are here, and enterprise adoption is accelerating. Gartner predicts that by 2028, the average global Fortune 500 enterprise will have more than 150,000 AI agents in use, up from fewer than 15 in 2025. Agents arrive with incredible, broad intelligence, but lack the knowledge of your operating model: your customers, policies, approvals, exceptions, business rules, systems, and operational history.

Your users increasingly work through AI assistants. When they ask an agent to check a case status, analyze last quarter's metrics, or kick off an approval workflow, that agent needs to access your enterprise systems. Enabling that connection is the core challenge of AI agent integration: giving AI assistants the ability to discover, understand, and safely interact with business applications and data on behalf of users.

Organizations have rapidly adopted artificial intelligence, but a stark divide is emerging: those who are embedding AI into the core of their operations, and those who are treating it as a standalone tool. According to a recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey, only a small share of resondents say their organization has largely integrated AI into workflows.

When we develop applications, we sometimes only focus on the “how”—how to build the processes, how to architect the data structure, and how to encode the correct logic. But for users, the "what" is their reality—and sometimes that’s overlooked during development. An application that looks and feels like your brand identity isn't just visually appealing. It builds trust, reduces cognitive load, and makes your application more enjoyable for your users.

Have you ever launched an enterprise application that sailed through every baseline test, only to falter when confronted with real-world demand? When you’re modernizing critical workflows for a major financial institution, a “good enough” architecture is a ticking time bomb. In high-volume operations, performance failures aren't just minor setbacks—they halt transactions, stall back-office teams, and expose the business to significant operational risk.

As enterprise development teams scale, coordinating deployments across multiple teams, applications, and environments becomes one of the most time-consuming parts of the delivery lifecycle. Today, we're excited to introduce Releases—a new capability in Appian that brings native release management to the platform, helping teams deploy faster and with fewer surprises.

AI is at the center of every conversation around operational efficiency, while at the same time being sidelined. In a recent Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey, only 18% of organizations report that AI is integrated within most of their workflows; twice as many run it as a standalone tool alongside the work. That gap—between AI that assists and AI that operates—is the defining problem of enterprise AI agents.

The pressure to scale AI is on, forcing most organizations to take a serious look at their legacy technology stacks and reinstate failed or postponed modernization projects. AI both requires and enables a modern enterprise. Traditional barriers to modernization—such as time, cost, and business disruption—are now significantly reduced with the introduction of AI modernization tools.