This spring, I attended three events: Salesforce TDX, Workato Work^AI, and Boomi World. They got me asking an odd-sounding question: Is integration platform as a service (iPaaS) still an iPaaS? My hang-up is with the word “integration.” Calling these tools an integration platform as a service orients them as narrowly focused on connecting applications and data stores. But much of what these events emphasized isn’t necessarily integration — it was at a higher level of abstraction, driven by AI.
Vendor Announcements
At TDX 2025, MuleSoft announced MuleSoft for Agentforce. This includes the Topic Center for developers to turn MuleSoft APIs into Agentforce topics and actions and API Catalog to centralize access to Agentforce topics and actions created from MuleSoft, Salesforce, and Heroku APIs. It also announced a connector to incorporate Agentforce into any integration workflow.
At Workato Work^AI, Workato similarly announced a no-code agent builder. It also showed Agent Acumen, a tool to aggregate insights from multiple systems and data. This enables organizations to proactively monitor business KPIs from agentic actions and intervene when they are out of band. It also released AgentX Apps, which are AI agents for specific tasks such as IT helpdesk and employee onboarding.
At Boomi World, Boomi announced Agentstudio. This platform has components to design, govern, and monitor agents without writing any code. Boomi also updated API management with features to present APIs as tools for agents and emphasized plans for agent-to-agent communications, and it described a marketplace of agents, including from third-party partners.
All three iPaaS vendors threw their weight behind Model Context Protocol (MCP), with features or plans to address MCP’s major security gaps.
iPaaS Is Becoming More Than Just Integration
The key theme of these announcements is creating an automation platform to build nondeterministic AI agents that work with traditional deterministic control flows to perform complex tasks and make autonomous decisions. Integration is foundational to this, but these announcements move beyond integration. Instead of focusing on gluing system A to system B, they focus on business process orchestration.
So is iPaaS still an iPaaS? The answer is yes … but not for long. This agentic pivot is still new. Most iPaaS vendors are not where these three vendors are with AI agents. These announcements show clear steps of iPaaS evolving to something more than just an integration platform. As agentic orchestration of business processes becomes the core of how these products are used, calling them merely “integration platforms” will become insufficient.
iPaaS As The Front End, Applications As The Back End?
This will become even more apparent as AI matures. In the future, many UIs will be a combination of two things: 1) agentic ChatGPT-like user experiences powered by agents, many of which will be built by iPaaS agent builders that will have evolved into adaptive process orchestration and 2) custom-built code from application generation (AppGen) platforms, with integration as a component of AppGen. This will pressure user interfaces from many application vendors to start to go away. These vendors will instead focus more on the components and systems of record that AI agents and AppGen platforms orchestrate. This would be an odd flip: What was once called iPaaS would move from the back end to the front end via user-facing agents and broader AppGen, while application vendors would be pushed toward back-end services from the front end. The rebalancing of the user experience is inevitable and will eventually change the world.
