Digital Labor’s Secret Weapon: Why Integration is the Key to AI-Powered Success

DISCLAIMER: This blog is about the art of the possible given publicly available information at companies and as such is not representative of any forward-looking plans of any of these organizations. 

Digital Labor is here and I’ve already witnessed first hand the incredible results that it can deliver at customers like UNC Charlotte.

Most organizations are coming to realize that lack of AI adoption would put them at a competitive disadvantage unlike any they’ve faced before, so they know they have to move quickly. But they’re struggling to come up with executable plans because like an alien invasion in a Hollywood blockbuster film, AI Agents seemingly arrived overnight. So IT organizations are scrambling for answers; they need to better understand how to prepare their organizations to be competitive in an Agentified world.

We’re on the precipice of a huge technological revolution, and IT knows that if they don’t figure it out quickly enough, their organizations will be at risk of getting left in the dust.

So what is the #1 thing they could be doing RIGHT NOW to prepare their future digital workforce for success?

It’s Integration. Again.

MuleSoft Founder Ross Mason had a really interesting blog recently on the future of APIs and how the AI of the future would interact with today’s systems in the most effective way. It went through several sophisticated options aimed at solving tomorrow’s problems. 

But many customers Green Irony talks to don’t yet have a firm grasp on how to scale out their integration investments in a reliable, predictable way.

And this is a big problem for AI Agents. While you can put them to work on simple (by today’s standards, anyway!) tasks like answering questions accurately based on the web and a knowledge base, to truly put them to work for us, we need integration, and a lot of it needs to be real time.

And by the way, you also need to think about securing agents and the whole DevOps lifecycle by making sure they DON’T have access to data and actions they should NOT have access to. But that one’s a topic for another blog.

So you need scalable integration. Again.

There’s not an easy way out of this. 

Salesforce’s market leading agent platform, Agentforce, allows an agent to be grounded on data from sources like a knowledge base, Salesforce on-platform data, and data imported into its data lakehouse, Data Cloud. Fully informed by this data, the Agent is then allowed to perform actions either with on-platform Salesforce flows or through MuleSoft APIs. Because of this, your

In other words, your Digital Labor cannot solve the swivel chair problem. It needs APIs to access actions outside of the Salesforce platform. An agent stuck inside Salesforce’s blue cloud is much less capable than one that can interact with your entire company to perform value-added, cross-system tasks. 

Integrations must also be very well-tested and hardened, because a buggy API in the hands of a workforce of Digital Agents is a scary proposition.

So now is the time to REALLY address integration because even an army of digital agents won’t be able to get to work without it.

Companies like Spirit Airlines are prepared for an Agentified future.

As you can see in their video success story, Spirit has systems integration figured out in a way that is almost unheard of in an industry with so many legacy technology point solutions. Their systems work in harmony to enable seamless delivery of IT investments without having to reinvent the integration wheel with every project. They are a living, breathing case study for how to use MuleSoft effectively.

In the past, this investment enabled them to rapidly execute on IT investments like a brand new loyalty program, a legacy chatbot shootout, and operational tooling to turn their planes around more quickly. In today’s world, it means that they could stand up a platform like Agentforce easier than any company I’ve ever worked with and start realizing immediate, game-changing value from Digital Labor.

What can you learn from Spirit’s integration approach?

Spirit saw reliable, real-time APIs as an investment in everything else they wanted to do for their business using technology.

In 2020, they knew that integration was holding them back from value realization. So they rolled up their sleeves and addressed the integration challenge head-on, designing a scalable network of APIs to serve as the backbone for all future projects.

And there’s nothing stopping you from taking a page from their playbook. Every business has a set of core systems and actions within those systems that are really important to its overall function, and if these systems work in harmony, then AI Agents can leverage them to do work more efficiently than ever before.

But without clean, reliable access to these systems, you can’t train Digital Labor to work for you.

So get started today on putting Digital Labor to work for your business. Talk to us about how.