BMC Unveils Agentic AI: Transforming Enterprise IT Work

Steven Dickens: Hello and welcome. My name’s Steven Dickens, and you’re joining us here for Six Five Media at BMC Connect. I’m joined by Josh and Ryan today. Hey guys, welcome to the show.

Ryan Manning: Thanks for having us.

Steven Dickens: So let’s dive straight in. Tell us a little bit about what you do for BMC and what you do for CoorsTek.

Josh Nichols: All right. Well for CoorsTek, senior manager of corporate applications, so oversee our AI program and other applications as well. And that plays into what we’re trying to do.

Steven Dickens: Fantastic.

Ryan Manning: Ryan Manning, VP of product management at BMC. I support our Helix products as service management and also our HelixGPT product.

Steven Dickens: So everything’s got to have a GPT.

Ryan Manning: That’s right.

Steven Dickens: It’s 2024, it’s compulsory. Ryan, let’s go to you first. How are you seeing Agentic AI transform what’s going on in enterprise IT? Just coming from the keynote lots going on there, hearing about it from clients, from the industry as a whole. What are you hearing?

Ryan Manning: Yeah, I think it’s all about user experience. I think that that’s probably what sets AI apart from previous platform shifts. Like cloud and mobile. I think it’s open season on UX paradigms. We feel that this technology is going to change the way we interact with software, in our personal and our professional lives. And when it comes to professional lives and enterprise software, we believe that oftentimes the best UI is no UI. And so we’re really, we have an internal goal of eliminating about 60% of our user interface in favor of these conversational experiences because we want to give these personal digital assistants to all of our power users.

Steven Dickens: That’s the upside. I think everybody can see that vision. What are some of those challenges that you’re hearing as you’re chatting to customers? What are those adoption challenges? What are some of the barriers that you are seeing?

Ryan Manning: Yeah, yeah. We’re focused on two right now, and the first is data. You can’t have an AI strategy without a data strategy. A lot of our customers are thinking about data governance, data security, data centricity, data assurance. And so we’re doing a variety of things to help them on their journey. Partnering with data cloud vendors like Snowflake is one, and we’re also building agents to help this, like the HelixGPT knowledge curator will help knowledge managers keep the knowledge base up to date and relevant. The other trend we’re looking at, challenge here is the deployment model for AI because we don’t know what that’s going to look like yet. We do know a few things. We know existing regulations are heightened, new regulations around the corner and data. A lot of our customers are thinking about monetizing their own data in the next 12 to 24 months and we’re going to be ready for that because the Helix platform is more portable than any other enterprise software platform out there. On premise, SaaS, public cloud, private cloud, and soon the Snowflake data cloud.

Steven Dickens: So what are you seeing as some of those competitive advantages? We joked a little earlier, it’s a busy, noisy market. Lots of people are talking about Agentic AI. What’s that BMC competitive advantage in this market?

Ryan Manning: Yeah, our deployability is definitely at the forefront, but it’s akin to the Apple and Microsoft wars of years and years ago. Our competitors taking a very command and control closed approach to AI. So they want you in their data centers using their GenAI services and they want you to move all your data into their data cloud. Our customers are liking our open approach. We’re almost taking an anti-platform approach here where we want to work with the tools you’re either already using or just about to start using. And Josh is going to talk to you about that in a moment here.

Steven Dickens: Yeah, bring you in, Josh. Obviously, BMC is making some great strides with the technology. But how do you, as CoorsTek, deploy that? What are you seeing? Tell us a little bit about some of the deployment models that you are seeing and how you are leveraging it within your business.

Josh Nichols: So our actual idea is a chatbot for not just interacting with BMC but interacting with all of our corporate applications. So we want a one-stop AI interface where our end-users can chat with one AI chatbot and interact with whatever application they need to. And the chatbot can make that decision for them even. So they may need to record a new lead in Salesforce or they want to schedule a meeting or they want to take time off. They just ask the chatbot. And we really think that’s going to change the world. You took my talking point. I think software interaction and UX and GUIs are going to become far less important over the next few years because Agentics is going to take over and really I think it’s going to change OS. If you don’t have an agent in your OS that can work with other agents, you’re not going to be competitive.

Steven Dickens: So how would you quickly summarize some of those benefits? We talked about the technology there. What are those key advantages and how’s the BMC Helix software impacting where CoorsTek is going?

Josh Nichols: The openness and the data. So one of our ideas is the security should sit within the software it’s already in. So my Workday security is already in Workday. I don’t need to move that data and rebuild that security somewhere else. I’m just going to access it via a chatbot. BMC’s approach is in-line with that as opposed to, as he mentioned, someone else that wants to take your data. We’re not interested in putting our data anywhere else. We want to keep it where it is.

Steven Dickens: I think that’s a great story. As we start to bring it home here, what are you seeing as that future view? If you were looking ahead, maybe we’re taking a 12-, 18-month, 24-month view, what are you seeing as that future for Agentic AI?

Ryan Manning: Yeah, I mean for us it’s a fleet of AI agents across the ServiceOps lifecycle. I talked about knowledge curator, CMDB auditor is another agent we’re building. We’re building HelixGPT insight finder. So no more waiting in line to see your local data scientists because executives and managers can converse with that agent to get meaningful analytics without knowing how to write SQL queries. So every single role in the IT operations landscape we want to have an agent for. That’s our vision.

Steven Dickens: I think that’s a fantastically broad vision. It’s been fantastic getting that view of how it’s impacting where you are going with CoorsTek. Thank you for sharing. You’ve been watching another episode of The Six Five Media coming to you live from BMC Connect. Please click and subscribe and check out all those other episodes. And we’ll see you again next time. Thank you very much for watching.