- Welcome Back, Automation
- Agentic Is the New Automation
- 5 Cities. 5 Partners. Hundreds of Future Agent Builders.
- Automation COEs Should Lead the Agentic Revolution
- Don't Get Left Behind
- Final Thoughts
A couple of personal milestones recently made me pause and reflect. This year marks 20 years in the automation industry and my first anniversary at SS&C Blue Prism. Between those milestones was a four-year detour into Cloud and AI at AWS. It was an incredible learning journey, but I have to admit something:
Glad to be back to My Roots - I'm incredibly happy to be back in automation.
And after spending the last month travelling across India for our Portfolio Innovation Day partner roadshow, I came back with a realization.
The automation community has been massively underestimating their role in the Agentic AI conversation.
Welcome Back, Automation
For the last few years, it has felt like the world has moved on. Every keynote was about AI. Every conference was about Agentic AI. Every LinkedIn post seemed to be about prompt engineering, vector databases, embeddings, RAG architectures and the framework of the week.
Meanwhile, the people who have quietly transformed businesses for the last decade seemed to disappear from the conversation. The automation developers, the business analysts, the process experts. The practitioners who understand how work actually gets done.
In many organizations, automation professionals started asking themselves difficult questions.
"Do I need to become a Pro-Code developer?"
"Should I move into data science?"
"Is automation still relevant?"
Some started leaving automation practices altogether in pursuit of the next shiny thing that would look good on their résumé. I think that's a mistake. Because the most important people in the Agentic AI era may be the very people we've overlooked.
Let me share an unpopular opinion. Customers don't buy LLMs, RAG architectures. They buy outcomes. They buy faster onboarding, lower operational costs, productivity, business transformation.
And nobody understands business transformation better than the people who have spent the last decade automating processes across enterprises. The automation community understands where work breaks, where the bottlenecks are, and how to manage exceptions, compliance and process variation.
Most importantly, they understand how to deliver measurable value.
Those skills are far more important than knowing the latest technical buzzword.
Agentic Is the New Automation
Here's my bold prediction. Agentic AI is not replacing automation. Agentic AI is the next evolution of automation.
The fundamentals haven't changed. Automation got us a long way but Agentic AI can help us unlock the next frontier. Think of it this way. Automation helped eliminate repetitive work and Agentic AI helps reimagine how work itself gets done.
And that means automation practitioners are uniquely positioned to lead this transformation.
We have a head start.
One of the biggest myths surrounding Agentic AI is that you need to become a Pro-code developer to participate. You don't.
You don't need to know how to build a RAG architecture, configure a vector database, understand embeddings, or spend weeks learning prompt engineering. In fact, you don't even need prior coding experience.
Democratizing Agentic AI
One of the questions many CEOs are asking today is simple: "How do we bring AI to everyone, not just a handful of specialists?"
As organizations commit to training hundreds of thousands of employees on AI, inclusivity becomes critical. This is where low-code and no-code platforms change the game.
Platforms like SS&C Blue Prism WorkHQ dramatically lower the barrier to Agentic AI adoption. Instead of spending months learning complex technology stacks, practitioners can focus on solving business problems and delivering value.
That's exactly what we saw during our recent Portfolio Innovation Day partner roadshow.
5 Cities. 5 Partners. Hundreds of Future Agent Builders.
Over one incredible week we travelled across India:
📍Deloitte India, Bengaluru
📍Infosys, Mysuru
📍TCS, Hyderabad
📍Accenture, Gurugram
📍HCLTech, Noida
The results exceeded all expectations:
✅250+ participants across five strategic partners
✅100+ Agentic AI use cases generated during the Ideathon Challenge
✅150+ participants completed the WorkHQ Foundation Training Challenge
But the most exciting statistic wasn't one of those numbers.
It was the number of people who walked into the room believing Agentic AI was beyond their reach and walked out having built their first agent. Many participants had little or no coding experience. Yet by the end of the sessions, they weren't just observing. They were creating, experimenting,building, and innovating.
One participant captured it perfectly:
"It was a very knowledgeable session. Without having any prior coding knowledge, we can create agents to solve the problem."
Another shared:
"The hands-on activities gave me a clearer understanding of WorkHQ and its potential business value."
That right there is the future.
Automation COEs Should Lead the Agentic Revolution
For years, Automation Centers of Excellence have been delivering tangible business outcomes: reducing cycle times, improving customer and employee experiences, eliminating manual effort, and driving operational excellence.
Agentic AI doesn't diminish that expertise. It amplifies it.
The people who know a process best should be the ones redesigning it for the Agentic era. And the people who delivered the first wave of automation should be leading the next wave of Agentic automation.
If automation delivered the first 30% of value, Agentic AI has the potential to unlock the next 70%. The opportunity is there. But only if the automation community embraces it.
Don't Get Left Behind
If you're an automation practitioner reading this, here's my message:
Don't sit this one out.
Don't assume Agentic AI belongs only to developers.
Don't assume AI is reserved for data scientists.
Don't think you need a PhD in machine learning before you can participate.
The future belongs to people who understand work. And that's exactly what the automation community has been doing for the last twenty years.
Final Thoughts
The Portfolio Innovation Day partner roadshow reinforced something I've believed for a long time.
The future of AI will not be defined by how many people can write code. It will be defined by how many people can identify meaningful business problems and solve them.
And if that's the game we're playing, automation practitioners are already ahead.
A huge thank you to our partners at Deloitte, Infosys, TCS, Accenture and HCLTech, and to every participant who joined us on the journey.
If you'd like us to bring a Portfolio Innovation Day to your team, your customers, or your office, we'd love to hear from you. We'll happily travel to any nook or corner of India.
And if you're in Bengaluru and fancy discussing Agentic AI over a good microbrewery or a nice cozy Cafe, I'm game for that too. 🍺🤘
P.S.No trip to Delhi is complete without a quick detour to Agra. Some traditions are worth keeping.
About the Portfolio Innovation Day Series for Partners
Portfolio Innovation Days are hands-on, interactive events designed to help our partners explore the latest innovations across the SS&C Blue Prism portfolio. Through live demonstrations and collaborative workshops, participants gain firsthand experience with solutions such as WorkHQ while connecting with peers, product experts, and industry specialists from across the ecosystem. Following successful events across the Americas, Europe, and APAC, we're continuing to expand the series globally. To learn more about Portfolio Innovation Days in your region, contact us at [email protected].
