Pegasystems Looks to AI to Transform Customer Businesses, Pegaworld Speakers Stress
LAS VEGAS--While artificial intelligence continues to drive deeper into organizations, companies are also looking to get AI-driven functions operational more quickly so that they can derive benefits sooner. That’s been behind the technical and strategic developments with Pegasystems and its partners in the past year.
The business transformation that AI is driving today would have been unimaginable only a few years ago, Pega founder and CEO Alan Trefler told the audience on the first day of the PegaWorld 2025 conference.
In many ways, AI technology presents a cacophony of issues, Trefler said, noting that thousands of potential prompts can produce thousands of different responses, not all of them accurate. The key is to use the right AI for the right situation, he said.
Trefler, a co-champion in the 1975 World Chess Championship, said he took a chess problem involving certain pieces in certain positions with white to be able to checkmate black in two moves. He ran the problem through ChatGPT 4.0, which came back with incorrect solutions, even with some additional prompting. So he instead ran the problem through Stockfish, an AI engine that doesn't use large language models, and instead is designed for chess. It returned the right solution in less than a minute.
Companies need to use the right AI for the right situation, Trefler said. "This is something that isn't well understood. People must understand it, otherwise the power of it can be overwhelming.
"This means you need to know to say the right way to conduct your business, the right way to design, the way you want to operate, the right blueprint," Trefler said. "Blueprints are the set of interests that are creative, that can reason, that can challenge you, but you're doing it at design time. You're doing it as you're planning what your musical score should be"
Pega Blueprint, a gen AI-powered workflow design agent, was unveiled at PegaWorld 2024. Today, the company announced expanded capabilities to help organizations rapidly assess and reimagine their legacy estates with a wider array of source inputs.
The updated Pega Blueprint enables organizations to upload documents, code analysis files, app screenshots, and videos of the app in use into the solution, which then analyzes and synthesizes these sources together to design an optimized application starting point. This approach is designed to provide business and IT teams a head start on their transformation projects while casting a wide net of legacy source information, enabling more informed decisions and reduced iteration cycles.
This kind of capability has enabled companies to upgrade solutions from 1980s technologies like Cobalt to modern-day cloud technologies.
"This is one of the things I'm super excited about, because this ties into our legacy transformation pitch," Trefler said. "We have deepened our relationships with a set of key partners, with two of our diamond partners, EY and Accenture, and a set of other partners."
These partners can now put their IP into a language model setup. Any best practices can be input as well, Trefler added. "This represents a unique step forward not just in collaboration but in innovation, in the whole way we work with this and our partners. That’s really important to us."
Trefler added: "This is a complete vindication of a separate idea that you want to be able to have the work that your business does at the center of your business now designed by Blueprint, driven by the center business logic, the business rules in the context of the channel."
In this way, the technology becomes the foundation of excellence for the organization, according to Trefler. "This is where our partners are going to be priceless in terms of being able to help make this happen."
Pega's partners will benefit from the new Powered by Pega Blueprint, which enables system integrators to infuse their own intellectual property and extensive industry expertise directly into Pega Blueprint. The company unveiled the Powered by Pega Blueprint at the conference.
Pegasystems also unveiled agentic AI enhancements to Pega Infinity App Studio to intelligently guide developers through application development so companies can innovate and go to market faster. Pega Infinity infuses AI into learning, design, integration, and testing. Key capabilities include the following:
- An enhanced AI developer agent;
- Streamlined integrations;
- An AI-powered robitic process automation design experience;
- Automated, AI-powered testing; and
- An accelerated user experience configuration.
Also unveiled at the PegaWorld event was Pega Agentic Process Fabric, a service that orchestrates all AI agents and systems across an open agentic network. By extending the Pega Process Fabric architecture, Pega Agentic Process Fabric enables agents, apps, systems, and data to work together to complete tasks through trusted workflows.
Pega Agentic Process Fabric enables companies to build agents that can automate end-to-end customer journeys. This new service intelligently registers AI agents, workflows, and data across Pega applications and third-party IT systems. It analyzes its library of discoverable agents, workflows, and data across systems, enlisting the most appropriate one for the job. It can leverage Pega Blueprint to design new workflows on the fly with human governance built in. Users engage with these agents on their preferred channels, such as chatbots, email, voice, and more.
Survey Says
But for all AI's potential, technical debt and an over-reliance on outdated legacy systems and applications is blocking enterprise adoption of more innovative technologies, according to a study Pega released at the conference today.
More than two-thirds (68 percent) of survey respondents say legacy systems and applications are preventing their organizations from fully embracing more modern technologies. Additionally, 88 percent are also concerned about how their technical debt impacts their ability to keep pace with more agile, innovative competitors, with 29 percent indicating either clear or significant concern.
Other findings include the following:
- Nearly half (48 percent) say they can’t stop supporting their legacy applications, despite wanting to, because the systems are still business-critical.
- Almost half (47 percent) say their oldest legacy application is between 11 and 20 years old, while 16 percent run apps that asre between 20 and 30 years old.
- Two-thirds of respondents say legacy systems are preventing their organizations from operating as effectively as possible, citing time spent on maintenance (44 percent), the siloed nature of disconnected systems, and the cost of maintenance (both 37 percent) as the leading contributing factors.