SaaS application transformation for headless enterprises

As AI agents replace traditional user interfaces and drive the rise of the headless enterprise, SaaS applications are being transformed into deterministic engines, where AI, rather than humans, serves as the primary interface to business systems.

As software companies rush to position themselves as headless, the challenge for enterprises is to bridge decades of legacy applications to the future of agents while maintaining governance and cost control. That tension is shaping Boomi LP’s product strategy, according to Ed Macosky (pictured), Boomi’s chief product and technology officer.

“Organizations have a set of applications that they rely on to run their business. Until recently, in traditional enterprises, different teams had to work on different systems because each team had responsibilities and user experiences that needed to be migrated,” said Makosky. “With the introduction of AI, we’re actually helping bridge the gap between applications being headless and AI being the head. The user experience comes through the agent experience, allowing applications and data to become more ubiquitous around the world. This isn’t about no user experience, it’s actually about making the user experience multimodal and allowing different accesses to the system.”

Makosky spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Gemma Allen at Boomi World 2026 during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s live streaming studio. They discussed Boomi’s platform strategy for headless enterprises, SaaS applications, and managed agent workflows. (*Disclosure below.)

SaaS applications become headless as enterprises become agents

The headless enterprise concept is forcing SaaS companies to rethink their core value proposition. Rather than competing on user interface design, application providers are repositioning themselves as deterministic rules engines, or umpires governing what AI agents can and cannot do, Makoskie explained.

“SaaS [companies] and application [companies] “We’re realizing that the real value of an application isn’t necessarily the user experience. These SaaS applications are becoming even more valuable in terms of being the referee for the AI ​​that’s trying to do something,” he said.

One of Boomi World’s new themes revolves around the combination of deterministic processes and agentic AI workflows. Makosky said pure agent chains, or chains where agents call agents, can be prohibitively expensive. By combining agent technology with deterministic workflows for simple tasks like running payroll or submitting expense reports, businesses can control costs.

“It’s very easy and very inexpensive for an agent to call a tool that’s just a deterministic workflow, like ‘run payroll’ or ‘submit expense report,'” Makosky said. “If it’s a pure agent that’s not under Boomi, they become agents that run agents, and the cost can explode with token consumption.”

Looking ahead, Boomi is betting on hybrid AI infrastructure as the next frontier. The company announced a strategic partnership with Red Hat Inc. to provide a single integrated stack for deploying agent AI at scale, integrating Boomi’s Agentstudio with Red Hat AI to enable organizations to run open-weight models privately, Macosky said. A priority for the year ahead is to unlock hybrid workloads in a controlled and secure manner, which means keeping enterprise data in a managed environment rather than routing it through a public frontier model provider.

“We are focused on [how we’ve] “Over the next year, helping our enterprise customers unlock the workloads they want to agent—those that can’t be unlocked in a secure way—is what I’m looking forward to as we move toward the next frontier.”

Below is the full video interview that is part of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Boomi World 2026.

(*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner of Boomi World. Neither Boomi nor any other sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage has editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE