Pega Is iNspired by Generative AI

LAS VEGAS -- A center-out technology, combined with the increasing capability of artificial intelligence as it evolves, is enabling Pegasystems customers to provide much more efficiency and other benefits for their customers, Alan Trefler, the company's founder and CEO, said during the opening keynote at the PegaWorld iNspire conference.

"This is a revolutionary moment; all of us at Pega have been gearing up for the challenge to give you things that I thought three years ago would not have been possible," Trefler said. "It's been great to see what customers are doing. One of the things that I'm super-excited about is that the vision that we have been talking about for the last five years is really beginning to take hold."

Too often in the past companies have invested in technologies to try to provide customers with better efficiency, more responsive service, and other benefits only to learn they were stuck with an unadaptable system that wouldn't work across channels and certainly not across new channels when they emerged, Trefler said. "This was the birth of the legacy system."

Such systems were cumbersome, difficult to make changes in, slow, and inefficient, he went on to say, noting that companies often tried to fix these legacy systems by making changes at the front end or the back end. But those changes didn't flow entirely through all systems and all channels.

The first step toward overcoming this challenge is having a cloud-based system, according to Trefler. Then work from the middle. Making the changes in decision engines in the middle enables the changes to flow both up and down the system.

"The center-out approach is extremely powerful," Trefler says.

AI, particularly generative AI, is making this all possible. However, Trefler noted that some have taken issue with the complexity of the technology. To address that, Pega has introduced solutions to help novices come up to speed quickly.

The company's new generative AI tutor, Pega GenAI Socrates, dynamically teaches core Pega skills to clients and partners.

Socrates can promote interactive dialogue to continuously adapt to each student's vertical industry, skill level, and learning needs. It prompts students to analyze real-life scenarios in their own words rather than using multiple-choice answers and incorporates multimedia elements like video, graphics, and voice-driven interactions.

Pega GenAI Socrates is part of Pega Academy and will teach in 10 languages to start: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Swedish, Polish, and Japanese.

"The growth of Pega technology adoption has created tremendous demand for Pega skills around the world," Mary Tafuri, Pega vice president, global go-to-market enablement and effectiveness, said in a statement. "Pega GenAI Socrates not only helps us meet this demand, it delivers a modern personalized learning experience that uniquely replicates how a human would teach on a massive scale. This is just the beginning of what we think Pega GenAI Socrates can do for our employees, clients, and partners."

Pega also used the conference to introduce enhancements and an improved user interface for Pega GenAI Blueprint, its design-as-a-service tool for creating mission-critical workflows.

New capabilities include the following:

• Legacy transformation accelerators to enable organizations to import assets, content, and knowledge.
• Live application previews across any channel, including web, mobile, customer service desktop, and customer self-service via Pega's DX API at any stage of the design cycle.
• An improved user interface.
• Data model generation behind each case type, with the ability to edit, add, and delete fields.
• Enhanced collaboration.
• A Generate More button that lets users ask the tool to create more asset ideas, such as case types, fields, or personas.
• The ability to upload and save proprietary workflow templates into Pega';s best practices library.

Once the blueprint design is complete, it can be imported into Pega's App Studio to turn it into a working application.

According to Pega, in just a few weeks, Pega GenAI Blueprint has generated faster adoption and more excitement than any offering in company history. Nearly 500 organizations have created more than 30,000 blueprints in just the past two months since product launch.

"The incredible response to Pega GenAI Blueprint has exceeded even our own high expectations," said Kerim Akgonul, chief product officer of Pega, in a statement. "It only takes a few minutes of blueprinting for people to realize the transformational power it brings to the app design process and, by extension, to the ability for organizations to innovate on a massive scale. We believe this is just the start for Pega GenAI Blueprint. There is endless opportunity for us to take this technology and apply it across the enterprise in revolutionary new ways."

Pega has also expanded its own genAI capabilities by connecting with Amazon Web Services' (AWS) and Google Cloud’s large language models (LLMs). The additions are designed to enable Pega clients to leverage genAI from AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Titan, and Google Cloud, including Vertex AI and Google Gemini, as well as Anthropic's Claude, into the decisions and workflows within Pega platform.

Companies that leverage Pega for generative AI-infused development, engagement, service and back-to-front office operations workflows will benefit from unified governance, auditability, and controls across all applications of genAI.

"The generative AI market is evolving rapidly as are generative AI strategies," said Don Schuerman, chief technology officer of Pega, in a statement. "Clients know the best model for them will depend on a variety of factors, including their own strategy and infrastructure, effectiveness, performance, speed, trust, and cost, so having choice is key. The extension of these relationships underline Pega's commitment to becoming the workflow backbone for generative AI solutions to enable truly transformational change for our clients. Our trusted partners play an important role in helping us to deliver these outcomes."

It's no surprise that Pega is investing so heavily in genAI, given that the rapid rise of creative right-brain generative AI has opened the door to greater adoption of the more analytical left-brain AI decisioning solutions by global businesses, according to Pega's own research.

The research found that 95 percent of respondents felt the increased prevalence of gen AI was directly responsible for their adoption of other types of AI tools, with one third saying it played a major role in their decision. It also showed generative AI has become the predominant way of deploying artificial intelligence (AI) within global enterprises, highlighting the extent to which it has been embraced as both a productivity enhancer and a creative partner for innovation.

Pega also found that right-brain genAI is the most used AI today, with two in five respondents (44 percent) saying they use it mostly for creative or productivity-enhancing tasks such as content creation (61 percent), curating large stores of information (54 percent), or in conversational chatbots (51 percent). Conversely, less than a third of all respondents (30 percetnt) predominantly use rational left-brain AI decisioning solutions, such as predictive analytics (57 percent), or decision management tools (42 percent). Only 25 percent of respondents use an equal number of both left- and right-brain AI tools.

Other findings from the research include the following:

• AI spend is on the rise, but so are transformational expectations. Ninety-two percent of respondents say it's likely they will increase their use of AI in the next five years, with 74 percent either extremely or very confident AI can add transformational business value to their organization over the next five to 10 years. In the short-term, the vast majority (82 percent) also expect to attribute up to half of their increased profits over the next three years to AI. However, 85 percent say they spend up to half of their annual IT budgets on AI, with 77 percent admitting to at least some level of waste due to a lack of a proper strategy.
• Half of respondents (47 percent) are concerned with resting the success of their brands on AI, while 51 percent also are concerned over AI transparency and bias. Forty-two percent are also worried about AI taking their jobs. Despite this, 62 percent have some level of trust in AI's ability to completely run a department. Meanwhile, 41 percent prefer to trust a human to build customer relationships, provided they had assistance from AI , compared to just 15 percent who trust a human more without AI intervention.
• Two in 10 think their organizations have weak AI skills and experience, while more than one quarter (28 percent) say this presents a barrier to further AI use.

"Generative AI is the flag-bearer of a new wave of AI enthusiasm, so it's no surprise that so many businesses are using it as a catalyst to not only explore other types of AI but also to drive more creativity and innovation," Schuerman said. "The next few years are going to see continued growth, not only in the acceleration of artificial intelligence in all its various forms, but also in terms of its adoption. To make the most of this, organizations must ensure they have the requisite skills, expertise, and understanding to make their AI projects a success. In the coming years, we expect to see more and more businesses not just adopting AI productivity tools, but partnering with AI to drive innovations that produce the best possible outcomes for themselves and their customers."