PegaWorld iNspire 2024: Transforming Project Delivery with Pega GenAI Blueprint

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. For those of you who have yet to meet Matt Healy, I help out with product strategy for our platform. So I get to think about all of the development capabilities and how we enable developers to build new applications in Pega quickly. And then what capabilities we have at that sort of foundational platform level in terms of AI and automation to help deliver value to the business. Um, and we're going to talk Blueprint in this. And, you know, you guys have probably been hammered over the head a little bit with Blueprint over the past couple of days. It's extremely exciting, and it's only about ten weeks old. But prior to Blueprint being generally available to everyone, to our clients, we made it available to our partner community about 30 days before that, you know, to get them both a preview, to get them to start to adopt it into how they engage with clients, development teams, IT teams, project teams, and then also to get their feedback.

So our partner community and we'll talk about this has really started to adopt it. And we wanted to kind of hear about success stories with that. So we ran a contest and we had it was open to all of our partners. We had everyone submit their Blueprint stories. What how is it sort of changed how they've been able to deliver value for all of our organizations that we deal with. And we got a ton of amazing stories, but one story really stuck out and that was from Virtusa. So they won the Blueprint Innovation Award, the first ever won. Um, so we're going to talk about some of how they've started to use that. And I'm pleased to be joined by the one and only Greg Price in order to do that.

So Greg, you want to do a little intro as well? Sure. Well, they didn't applaud for you. They applauded for me. I just started talking. I was introduced and I got an applause. My name is Greg Price. I'm from Houston, Texas. I've been with Virtusa for nine years with a little break at another firm.

When I came back to Virtusa, my role is to lead our Pega agenda with with regard to delivery excellence, solutions and innovation, where Blueprint falls squarely on our lap. Awesome and congrats on the award. And before we get into some of how you've started to leverage Blueprint, tell me a little bit about Virtusa and what you guys are up to. Sure. Well, where the where the where the smallest company with the biggest Pega practice, right. I mean, there's there's around 35,000 of us, but about, you know, 10% of us get up every morning and deal in Pega we lay hands on Pega. And for a competency of that size, you're going to find you're going to find companies, our competitors with like 400,000 employees and things like that. Pega is really important to us, right? And it's the reason for that is it's really kind of changed who we are.

Um, when we met Pega 20 some odd years ago, we only served an engineering arbitrage of ISVs, independent software vendors, companies like Pega, and the founder of the company ended up, you know, he won the business with Pega, a guy named John Gillis. He's still with us. He didn't come today because he's unwell. Um, but he's still very involved. Um, but this is the man that bet the company on Pega. Um, we provided a couple hundred resources to help build the Pega rules process, commander, which was what was was evolved from Pega works and a prpc, which is now Pega Infinity. So we've been in the engineering game for a long time. And after we released Pega or Pega released Pega, and, you know, we were the keyboard jockeys, we knew Pega and we started to participate in professional services with Pega, which made us an MC, and that became our new business model. And so Pega it changed us.

Um, we're very intimate with the technology. We are very we're very impressed by the technology and how it's evolved in our. And we're very proud of our engagement with it and the amount of success that we've been able to deploy with it. You know, and we always make sure that we're at the highest level of partnership. We're a global elite partner. Um, but, um, kind of a Pega shop. Virtusa. I mean, you helped build the platform, which I didn't know before we started talking about this, which was crazy to me because I know I look old, but I was not around 22 years ago. I wasn't even born.

So oldest, 21 year old looking 21 year old of all time. Um, so you guys have all heard about our generative AI strategy over the past couple of days, like all these new capabilities that we're putting out into the market to help increase productivity kind of across the board. But Uh Virtusa. You guys also have sort of a transformational generative AI strategy that you're pushing forward. So can you tell me about that? Well, absolutely. Yeah. So Helio is what we call it, and that's a new brand name that we just put on something that we launched like in November 2022. Does that date resonate anyone?

It was I mean, we had an X labs. We had a we had a function in Virtusa called X labs, and we did some generative AI experimentation. But when ChatGPT had a million users within like a couple of days, we formally organized that into a global generative AI COE the you know, the cat was out of the bag and we needed to figure out what this meant. We're an engineering company. You'll see under our logo, it always says engineering first. What that means is that anything that we do, you know, Virtusa is never going to slide a $500,000 binder in front of you with all How to operate your business. Everything we do is going to land on a hardened IT asset or a transformation or something like that. We want to build things right. So as engineers, we're students of the engineering game.

And you know, the linen cloth is being ripped out from under the table on from an engineering what my life is going to be like as an engineer in the Generative AI era. We at Virtusa immediately recognized that with ChatGPT and organized that that COE, it's up to 450 members that are scattered across the competencies of Pega. Those competencies are digital assurance or testing, digital engineering, which is conventional for GL stuff digital platforms, which is where we are with with Pega and cloud technologies and everything that surrounds all that. That's what we do. Helio, the word picture, it's called as such because that the Greek god Helio would drag behind his chariot, the sun shining a light on everything that we do. It has impact everywhere. So those 450 COE members are sitting in Pega practice, sitting in other practices, sitting in Cloud practices, working with the hyperscalers, all that stuff. The top 4000l of Pegasystems of Virtusa have gone through northwestern Kellogg studies around AI. We've educated ourselves very well over the past two years, and we find this engineering change, the let's call it conventional engineering, digital engineering.

It's what we do today and it's rich pickings for innovation. There's lots can be done. But the new pervasive impact of generative AI, I think, forms a new you know, what we in Virtusa referred to as S-curves. Um, uh, is AI engineering. It's the new wave, and it impacts everything that we do, and it's imminent and it's coming and it's unavoidable whether wherever you are on the hype cycle of doubting or whatever it is we we feel very, very confident. Everything is changing. And Helio is our set of offerings and accelerators and competencies and capabilities that is meant to compel our clients to adopt this new engineering paradigm, which is scary and it feels risky, and we're providing that support. And as we get through the conversation today, Pega has a very, very special place in that strategy and what we're able to do with Helio and how we remove constraints in the Generative AI process and get out of the science project mode and into the value mode. So I love it.

Yeah. And I know we kind of had to sneak this slide through your marketing department that didn't really like the S-curves, but I kind of like them, right? You know, you think about it, we were probably in that trough last this time last year. Everyone's slapping Generative AI into their press releases and stuff like that. And I think we're at the pivot point and starting to see real value from a lot of this capability. So tell me about your first impressions of Blueprint and how it got introduced to you. I'm sorry, I don't do impressions. My field is engineering. Hey, that was pretty good though.

No, that's like, what is that? Airplane? Um, so I was a little cynical. Pega is always unwrapping new toys, and we wonder where are they going to do it? And they're always innovating and it's always fun. And, you know, I was always like, well, let's see where they take this, right? And I got a very early view of it from Leon. Uh, I was it might have been in an iPAC session, a partner advisory thing where he showed it and it wasn't Pega Blueprint yet. It wasn't like on Pega.com or anything.

It was just he showed a QR code and we all opened up our phones and, you know, we heard the llama rental joke. Is everybody sick of hearing about the llama rental? Um, anyway, that was. Yeah. Um, but what I did was, um, I'm a I'm a recovering musician, and, um, I am into guitars and pianos and things like that. What I my prompt was a luthiers guide to Guitar maintenance or something like that. Um, I don't remember what it's exactly because it's not in Blueprint. And I lost it because it was. I'd like to go back and look at it, but I did it and I was like, oh, that's cute.

That's DCO. Computer aided DCO. Uh, you know, we don't talk about DCO very much anymore. It's directly capturing objectives. And it's and it's essentially, uh, walking through the scaffolding of constructing a Pega application. And it used to be this moment at the beginning of an implementation like Blueprint feels right now where we would get those objectives in there. But now it's pervasive in the case designers throughout the entire process. I'm always talking about personas and case types and stages and steps and all that stuff. So DCO is pervasive.

And my first read on this Well, that's that's pretty cool. And, uh, it saves me about maybe an hour of writing things in here if I do the Generative AI. But you're talking about the most valuable time that I have with the business in the Jad session where I'm doing DCL. So I was a little cynical at first blush then. And when I did this first with a client. And I'll talk about that in a minute. But I saw something that gave me like, oh, this is interesting. And it was just a pro tip, right? In one of the in one of the case types, which was, you know, restringing in a guitar, right, guitar maintenance luthier level.

Right. And there's all these steps that you would expect around the tuning machines and all the and, you know, stretching it and, you know, making taking tension out of it and all that stuff. You handle the strings a lot when you restring a guitar. And there was a final step wiping down the strings in there. And I've been playing guitar for 40 years. Right. And it was, you know, it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I realized that the amount of my disgusting, grubby hands that I'm handling the guitar, I'm getting my smudges all over the nickel, and it's creating erosion. I'm having to change my strings, you know, a lot more often, right? Wipe down the strings.

It's a pro tip. Now, I learned that on my own after playing guitar for a long time. But what are we going to learn about your operations from some pro tip from the great unwashed of open AI, and it doesn't cost us anything for it just to make the suggestion, you know. You know, so the other thing around DCO and we'll get to this. But the other thing around DCO was when you were in DCO, you were building the Pega system, right? You were moving dirt around. This is different, right? Yeah. This is different.

Yeah. So I do want to get into that. So, you know, just to kind of show you. So you got your suggestions around your guitar maintenance workflows, your life cycles, which is awesome. Um, you know, I could not repair a guitar for the life of me, but I feel like with Blueprint I would have the sickest customer experience for a maintenance shop. Just everyone would get their guitars back worse than when they gave them to me, but whatever. Uh, so. Oh, God. Oh, God, I broke it.

All right, so let me get back into the presentation. Um, so, you know, you mentioned a couple of times DCO, which, uh, just for folks who are maybe newer to Pega or have never heard that term before, um, that it stands for directly capture objectives. And it's been core to the Pega platform for years and years and years. This whole idea that business and it can be collaborating on application requirements and do so in a way that is going to streamline the actual building of that application. And that for, you know, since it was introduced, has been, to your point, baked into the development environment. I think what you're saying is, you know, bringing that into Blueprint as a little more of a SaaS free form experience, you know, lets you extract the benefits of that DCO collaboration approach without maybe muddying your development environment. Is that right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

So, you know, on kind of continuing that thread, what are some of the big opportunities that you see with Blueprint in accelerating things like business and IT collaboration? Yeah. Well, I mean sometimes business and IT collaboration is just a cultural issue. And you know, if you're doing Pega you got to fix that. Like you're not going to be successful if you're not collaborating with the business. Right? It is the the Pega is very, very strong at articulating a business architecture in a technical environment in a way that other platforms are unable to do it right. And the Situational Layer Cake and the way that business actually operates. So please, I mean, you got to collaborate, but the best way to collaborate is in a jam session, joint application development session where you actually do the directly capturing objectives and Pega would facilitate that.

What we would have to do is we'd have to get it on the calendar, and we'd have to spin up an instance and we'd have to get in there, and we'd have to get an operator behind me. If we're doing live DCO right with the business in front of us, sometimes we just write it down. We go back and and do it behind the scenes. But I need to spin up an instance. And when I'm doing it, I'm creating, I'm creating, I'm creating. Pega. Right. This is different. This is pega.com.

So I can sashay into anyone's office. And if we happen to get on the topic of, you know, exploring, you know, a process network of some kind, I can spin up a Blueprint on Pega.com Pega.com Blueprint is delivered in a Pega system. When I log in there to Blueprint. Now open it up. It's DCS APIs coming from Pega. It's a react Front end API is going back to Pega. It's a Pega system, so when you're creating a Blueprint, it's just a case. And, you know, a case can be thrown out like garbage. And you can have you can have, you can create ten different versions of the same case.

And it doesn't cost anything. You're not creating any debt, you're not creating any constraints. You're free to just explore on pega.com. And then when you're ready to go, you get your JSON out and you're back in the system, right? So the ability to spread out around innovation without all the constraints around spinning up an enterprise instance and getting and being able to just monkey with it rather than this big formal Jad session, you know, because what are you going to see when you're monkeying with it? If you just had the Jad session, if you just had the objectives, I'd just get your opinion. The blind man's touch of the elephant. Right. This is the experience that I want to have.

Right. But now we're going out to open AI and we're and we're taking generative AI and what that what the Blueprint system is doing is it's taking those essentially the instructions that are coming from OpenAI to describe the the scenario and turns it into Pega stages and steps, personas, data, whatever it is that we'd have in your Blueprint. Right? And it shows you what Pega would have you do with it. One of the biggest problems I have is, is is opening the aperture of what Pega is capable of doing. When you come in, we find a lot of people are treating Pega like it's a legacy. Um, and the amount of R&D and innovation that Pega puts into the machine is staggering, right? You. I sometimes wish they'd spend that kind of money on their marketing.

Right. Because I think right now they pay by the letter because it went from pega.com to Pega go. So one less letter. Pega x coming soon. Pega x coming soon. But it's hard. I mean, it's hard to evangelize for Pega because it's so amorphous and complex and it does all these things and it's got all these sort of evolutionary things. And I got to find out what is Pega to use, sir or ma'am in your company. Oh, well, it's our home lending application.

Does onboarding. No, no, no, this is rapid application development we can do with this thing. You know, rules, process. I don't need to start selling Pega here now, but expanding that aperture and helping clients to understand what Pega can do, because our goal is always make me aware of the process as early as possible. And let me resolve the process as late as possible, so that I'm articulating as much of the business as I possibly can, so I can see what's going on, and I can exploit more opportunities for automation. And I want to talk to the business. They're going to say, this is what I want. This is the gap. Then we're going to focus on that gap.

But then when you show what Pega wants to do, you get a much more complete life cycle. And it's very interesting. And it's you can delete it and throw it away because it doesn't cost anything to draw it on the screen. You don't have to take it. It's human in the loop. You can throw it in the garbage and say, huh, that's interesting. But, you know, it's a really meaningful exercise I've found. Yeah, yeah, it can take a long time to sort of Pega is a broad platform, tons of different capabilities. So it can almost be like a consult consultation in itself to like map business problems, to pega.com technology and just being able to enter in your goals what you're looking to do and have Generative AI take a first pass at that I think is and paint.

That picture is really powerful. So I see here modernization is also on the screen, which I'm really excited about. And that's actually sort of the lead in to the story with which you won the Innovation Award. So tell me a little bit about what you guys have going on with Macquarie Bank. So, um, so the, the, the, the, the, the backlog has been completely hijacked by modernization. Station at Macquarie. We started our journey there about six years ago and we had to stabilize a very large system, 1400 some odd processes. And situated as a situational sheet cake, right. There was no leverage.

There was no inheritance patterns, there was no Layer Cake. It was a sheet cake. And, um, they had to modernize their practices, all that stuff. So, you know, when you think about Blueprint, you think about I'm spinning up a. Net new application. It's clean, it's a blank canvas, and I can come in here and I can hydrate that thing. And if I need to monkey with it later, you know, and evolve the application. Blueprint has some meaning there because I can rearticulate the Blueprint, bring it back into the Jason, connect it to the existing cases that I'd previously done, or if there's a strategic app and all that stuff. So my assumption at the beginning of Blueprint was this is how to spin up an application quick.

I didn't realize it was going to be part of the life cycle I certainly didn't appreciate where it belonged in modernization and at Virtusa we are focused on modernization. I think that there happens to be in the Pega ecosystem a little bit of a logjam around innovation. There's we're very highly indexed on change in the Infinity era. And to adopt the capabilities that Infinity is offering, modernization becomes a very necessary thing. An upgrade is not a modernization. We no longer use the word upgrade because one of the options for an upgrade would be a tolerance upgrade. Let's pick up the application, stick it in the new environment, see if the application tolerance the new environment. If it doesn't, then we'll play whack a mole for a little bit until it's good. Now with recon we have again.

We have we feel very, very comfortable with the way the the Pega technology works. So we've been able to write some automations using some AI to pull that meta information from Pega and your Pega instance, and come up with a rubric of refactoring and all that stuff to, to, to, to, you know, what it's going to take to, to build it. We've gotten very, very, very good at this. Right. A lot of the work that we do is with some IT folks who just want to resolve some technical debt, get it into the new instance. I'm worried about end of service requirements from Pega and all that stuff. You know, so modernization, you know, our goal is to make sure that they've adopted and they're moving the needle on the business with modernization. And then we're serving them in sort of an evergreen that they're not they're not stopping everything and upgrading. And they're in the new environment.

And they can continue. They can innovate as long as they want without having to stop to do some husbandry work. Right. Because we're doing it all along. Now. Blueprint is very important in modernization, particularly when considering the value you're going to drive to the business. We've made a lot of money at Virtusa doing upgrades that didn't do any good for the business because there were tolerance upgrades or we just, you know, maybe we flushed out some technical debt. We didn't provide anything to the business. Right?

We we paved the cowpath. We moved the environment in. And sometimes it's a really good asset and it should be promoted. It's not it's not, you know, it's not bad. It's not broken. But what Blueprint does now, if I insert Blueprint into the process after I've recon the tool, I know what's been. I know what's been constructed. Right? I know what the process is.

It's articulated in Pega. And I can take that and I can run a Blueprint, um, in the current state based on how I argue with Blueprint, right. When we start talking about what's coming next with Blueprint, I'll talk about what is freaking me out at the moment with Blueprint. Um, but um, that bit there's an opportunity there with Blueprint to take a very well constructed prompt that comes out of our recon machine. That's something that we're working on, a prompt that comes out of recon that that is that that works in the, in Blueprint to, to say what would what is the gen AI tell us, and what is pega's opinion of whatever that produces? What are the differences? What needs to happen next? Is there an opportunity to move the needle, move the chains on the business value? Yeah, I mean I love it and I just want to maybe set the context to.

So what we're looking at on the screen here is Virtusa modernization approach, I think, which includes. Tools. And strategies and processes kind of across the different phases of a modernization project. So recon is a tool which kind of analyzes older Pega instances and lets you sort of get a repository or an assessment of what's in there. And then you take that and kind of do what you're saying is you try and work with the business and reimagine, optimize as you're refactoring and rebuilding into the latest and greatest capabilities. And then eventually you get it on to to the cloud platform. And I think to your point, and we heard the same thing from, from Deutsche Telekom this this morning. Oftentimes get in the business to like work with you and reimagine these workflows is a struggle. It can take a long time, right?

You got to kind of like open their their minds to what's possible. You got to have the conversations. You got to get the requirements. You got to work through. You got to get the designs, get a prototype, get a review, review it. Buh buh. That doesn't sound fun. So this is exactly where Blueprint can fit into a modernization approach, giving you that that place to reimagine and optimize workflows. And we at Macquarie, we got to put it on a steel thread, right?

It needs to be a churn, a workshop, right? So we're building in more customizations to our automation. But, but, but what Blueprint is doing for us right now is um, is very promising. It's very promising. It's early stages. The story that I told was the day that I got an announcement from, I think Judy Buchholz might have sent like here's the link Blueprint is live just for partners, right? I happen to be in Sydney on that day at the digital Bank, a retail bank. Macquarie. Um, and uh, we had a quarterly governance that afternoon.

So I hijacked the agenda and I said to the CIO, let me show you this. Uh, let me show you this. What I did was and I said, we're modernizing hundreds and hundreds of workflows that are encapsulated in a singular system. We didn't build it that way, by the way. We inherited it. We unstabilized it. Virtusa doesn't build dumpster fires, right? We know how that Layer Cake works, right? Um, we're not building any sheet cakes, but, um, uh, the goal here was to modernize all these flows that were almost processed segments, but they were articulated.

You know, there's 1400 of them, right? We were able to quickly identify a few that we could amputate. But where Blueprint was really interesting was we had done work that I was going to present in that quarterly governance, where we showed the old process and the new process that we, the Pega experts from Virtusa, had envisioned. And it was better and it made better use of the platform. Then I ran a Blueprint on it was some payment optimization, something, blah blah blah blah. I can't remember what it was, but what it blew out and articulated was what what you can do with Pega finally won an argument and it was the CIO because I presented, I was like, let me show you the coolest thing that Pega has just come out with, and I just got access to it today. I gotta show you this. I gotta show you this thing, and I was able to just run down the hall and show it to him. It's on Pega.com.

You don't do that with Pega. You know, you move mountains to get an instance. Take offense to that. No. We do need an instance. Oh. Um, but what we showed in in Macquarie's business from the Generative AI what Pega is desirous to do, given the information, it blew out the amount of value that we could provide with Pega. So now the campaign is blowing the minds on tour with the business users. So because we're, you know, we're out of the starting blocks on modernization, it's a long road, but we really feel like we're finding a real accelerant that is going to unify the business scenarios that are scattered hither and yon in this crappy solution.

Yep. And through things like the Blueprint import, you're able to turn around prototypes demos really quickly. Yes. Get their feedback on that. So, um, I definitely see a massive opportunity here. And so what's next with Macquarie? Where are you taking this? Um, well, I mean, now we we have we're there's, there's, there's there's a lot that's next. Right.

And, you know, I think we'll be at this for a couple of years. We've got to unravel 1400 processes. And there's a bunch of other solutions that are modern solutions that require the, you know, attention and husbandry work as well in, in this, in this program. Um, but what what what's what's next is, is it's kind of the it's it's the it's the what's the perception campaign. Um, around Pega. Macquarie's had Pega for a long time and they still think it is whatever it was when they bought it. And, um, you know, Pega R&D Pega always coming out with something cool. Ripping that linen cloth out from under us. Right.

And Pega no longer resembles what Macquarie thinks Pega is. And that's a very, very, very common, common thing. Yeah I love it. So definitely I appreciate you telling me about this story. Modernization. I think there's tons of opportunity here. And as we saw on the stage yesterday with things like BPM import and the like, this is just going to become more and more capable. Blueprint is to enable rapid modernization and migration of legacy processes. But you're not just using Blueprint to modernize, you've incorporated it sort of across your client engagement.

So tell me a little bit about maybe how you're approaching new projects now and where you've done that. Well, I mean, of course, if we're going to start a new project and they're starting in the Infinity, uh Platform era, you use Blueprint, you start your programs with Blueprint. Right? I would have done it in, I would have done it in DCO, but I would have had to spin up an instance. Why should I do that? I can go right and do the sit in the conference room now. I happen to be in Sydney when this happened. I wasn't in the room. Right.

But I you know, here's the thing about Virtusa when it comes to Pega, you're going to find us at 3 a.m. in the tent, in the cold outside the door when a product is launched. Right? We're the nerds outside the the Apple Store, right? So we're we're very enthusiastic about Pega as Pega evolves. So we were very quick to adopt it, all of us. Um, and we had, you know, an insurer, um, that was having some, uh, part of their product management, uh, capability. Um, we used Blueprint, uh, in a proper Jad session. It was our first one.

We've done a couple since at other clients. Um, like I say, all of our Jad sessions are Blueprint enabled now, and, uh, we, uh, we are building a Pega system from this rapid acceleration the Jad session lasted, I think. What was it, two hours? Something like that. It was, it was, it was quick. It wasn't an all day thing. And it was very impressive. And here we are. It berthed to us, a Pega system.

I can attest Greg is very eager about the new capabilities. He essentially woke me up at four in the morning asking if the live preview was live on Pega.com knocking on my hotel door, I was like, I'm sleeping, Greg. But, you know, kind of tell me about where you see all this going and how Pega and Virtusa Generative AI strategies align in the future. So, I mean, I was I was teasing this a little bit before, but I mean, essentially as students of the engineering game, it's it's changed, right? And we've spent the past couple of years doing science projects, building disciplines around evaluations of LMS, working with our other partners in the hyperscalers. We have great partnerships with AWS and Google, um, building the competency over the past couple of years and sort of putting our finger on the pulse of where the industry is, and it is daunted, and there is some fear, and there are very interesting risk control conversations happening around this. But if I but if I use Pega as my as a pre blazed trail into AI led engineering, it's prophylactic. It's it's it's it's a lot of friction is removed right. Everything we do in Blueprint and everything that Pega has yielded with generative AI and AI led engineering assets that they have.

All of it creates a Pega system. None of the AI. There's no GenAI goodies that are buried in a in Pega. The only thing that's ever created when you run any of the generative AI stuff Pega Pega rules. And then, you know, you know, whatever you do, like text and things that go in the database and things like that. It doesn't create code, right. And that's, that's that is one thing that relieves us from a lot of anxiety. And we can be very confident about human in the loop, because what it's creating ultimately are battle hardened. Pega rules, the same rules you're running at Chase Bank, Citibank, the biggest banks in the world, biggest insurers in the world are depending on this thing to work every day.

Battle hardened rules that are just instantiated or documented by generative AI and put into the Pega machine. It's all Pega Pega unchanged, right? Pega doesn't create a lot of code, right? It's a lot of it is just battle hardened, right? And this gives us a risk control. The other bit is there's no science projects we can tap into the existing inertia of delivery and competency and familiarity and partnership. If I gather if I'm sitting with some manufacturer and we're doing some Pega stuff and I get I have Pega, they want to move into AI led engineering. They want to move into that new S-curve, as we call it, right? We Pega has invested, they've created assets and they've made it safe.

There's a firewall from prompt misinterpretation or hallucination. You're not going to get anything past it because it's creating PegaWorld. And you've got Virtusa who's done their homework. Right? And we've invested. The King's ransom in building generative AI competency. And we're landing on this platform that we both know so well, and we're doing it in a very safe way, and we're putting things in production. Right? It's not a science project.

We're putting it in production. And Pega backlog is lousy with generative AI stuff. Right? Um. It is, yeah, it is. And, uh, just whenever I see this slide, you put pathway to the Green Zone on it? I just have Kenny Loggins stuck in my head. Pathway to the Green zone. Yeah.

Um, so I love it. I think we're totally aligned in terms of overall Generative AI strategies, which is great, but how do you see Blueprint continuing to be adopted across your practice? Well, I mean, it's it's it's it's it's a requirement, right? It's a requirement for delivery. Right. We deliver in excellence. We are very emphatic around what modernization looks like with all of our modernization and legacy and getting it there. You know, it's it's the way Pega is done now, right? And it's going to keep changing.

It's just going to keep changing. And what Blueprint can push, it's in a SaaS so it can evolve very, very quickly without friction in a client environment or something like that. We can very, very rapidly, um, do innovation, create assets? We've gone to the marketplace where we're um, we're fairly prolific as Virtusa. I think we might have one of the top numbers of solutions out there. We've gone through there and we've created templates Blueprint templates to marry up with all of our solutions. Um, and by the way, they when we ran blueprints on some of our solutions, they changed our solutions because we learned more about provider lifecycle management and sample collections. In, in in clinical trials, we learned more. It changed our products.

Um, so it's it's as we create assets, we catalog them as blueprints. Um, and of course, our modernization agenda is, is full, full of blueprint and wherever blueprint is headed. Blueprint. That's it. Yep. Just do it. Uh, so with that, I just wanted to thank you, Greg, for kind of taking us through how you started to incorporate. Well, hold on a second. I, I was there's something that we I thought there was a slide where, like, what's next with generative AI?

Is there. Uh, no. You might have dreamt that. Let me just let me. You might have dropped it. But if we don't have if we have time, the one thing I wanted to point out, and I don't know if everybody appreciates this when we have with Blueprint today, we have the case designer and all that stuff. It's the scaffolding I need, I need, I need Pega experts now to go start authoring the rules. Right. Building a class structure, making getting leverage out of it, creating inheritance patterns, all that stuff.

Pega has promised us BPMN 2.0 imports as an argument for Blueprint BPMN. If you're not familiar and if you're not familiar with DCL, you're probably not familiar with BPMN 2.0 because it's old school. BPMN 2.0 is a is a is a business process notation standard. So we document processes and tools like software, AG, Eris, things like that. We document these processes to memorialize the process, and the notation of those process is dense. There's a lot of density in the notation, with lots of instructions of what how this process is going to perform in the real world. Pega is not BPMN 2.0 compliant. Why? Because who cares about all that crap if we're executing the process in the machine?

But one thing Other BPM people did was they created this sort of handoff with BPM n 2.0 models into the execution machine. So if you look at IBM's smarter process, which is Lombardi Blueworks Ilog, now they call it ODM blue washed integrated stack Pega unified architecture. Blue washed Blueprint blue works. The previous title of blue works was Blueprint. Did you know that? Yes. It's a good name. Yeah, that's where you do BPM 2.0. Then you drop that thing in Lombardi or whatever they call it now.

And that's where your executable is, right? Camunda we do it the same way. BPMN 2.0. We move that in BPMN 2.0 came out in 2010. There's not going to be a 3.0. We're digitizing process. We're dealing in digital process. If I'm importing the ramifications of importing BPMN 2.0, when you've put a prompt into Generative AI, it uses every bit of it and tries to come up with some response to give it to you in Paganis. Right.

It's going to try to do that. We're beyond the scaffolding of an application. If we're implementing BPMN and 2.0 models directly, or importing them into a Generative AI thing, you're right, you're going to be writing flow rules for us. And I'm freaked out by that. I'm very freaked out by that. And I wonder how that looks. So, you know, the BPM 2.0 thing that that that is an indication of how far Blueprint is going to go is we're well beyond DCO, and we're also solving a problem that I've been having arguments about for the past 15 years, around BPMN 2.0. Right. So I just wanted to get back to that because we said BPMN 2.0.

And I don't know I don't know if that's like, you know, some old dudes only know about that stuff and what it is because we just don't see it too much. What it means, and it's really out there, like we don't interact with them. But if I go to, I don't know, March Mercer, I'm going to find a processor architecture group that are monkeying around in Eris with BPMN 2.0. I'm going to find them. And you'll see that live on Pega.com in just a few weeks. The ability to add that BPMN diagram into the case types portion of your blueprint and have a starting point for rethinking some of that stuff, and it's not going to, to your point, create the flows. It's going to give you the opportunity to redesign them in blueprint. So there's no pushing Generative AI creative flows or anything like that directly into development or production environments. And then the other thing is, you know, you're right.

I can't say too much about our roadmap, right? There's so much that's already available for us to go out and use. But don't be surprised if in a couple of months or this time next year, we're talking about a lot of capabilities to help assist modernization and migration of legacy assets. So exciting times. But I'm looking at the clock. We only have two minutes left and I do want to see if there's any questions. So you know before we do that. Thank you Greg and congrats again. Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

Thanks for the award. Exciting stuff. Yeah, we'll go back. Gary and I are going to go back into the tent. We're waiting for the next Knowledge Buddy release. Gary's a busy man. Any questions? Thank you so much for the session. My name is Raghav.

I'm from Booking.com. Uh, I would like to know, in your experience using Blueprint? Did you arrive at a place where you know how to, you know, prompt, uh, about your project? Like, is there a set of guidelines that you followed? Yeah, we're we've been developing those guidelines. Um, we have, uh, anointed a Blueprint czar, a gentleman named Manohar, who's a proper principle lead business architect, loves Pega. He's been figuring out how do you argue with Blueprint to get the right results and those arguments. I mean, he's been able to do that because he's. He was trying to get Blueprint GenAI to give us the case structure that we had landed on in our preordained assets, because we know they work and they're hardened.

PLM provide a lifecycle management tool that we built for Healthcare. It's really good. And we just wanted to make sure that the Blueprint stood up. Now, we found some goodies in the Blueprint when we did it because Manohar was like Ted said to the product owner, well, we've got it pretty close, but they've got this one thing around. I can't remember what it was, but it was like, well, we should probably put that in the backlog, right? So and that's that's what happened. So getting that we have been sort of memorializing and we have, you know, resources on our global Tiger team that leads our Pega agenda, um, that are just focused on that. And they are developing those, you know, tips and tricks around how verbose do you need to be, what you know, what words work and but getting consistency out of generative AI is very, very challenging. So even if we don't have the techniques to get you the same thing every time, we don't have that.

What we feel like, we have the techniques to get what we want out of when we need to go build. The other thing I would just add is, um, you know, I think we definitely have to do some better, uh, publish some better guidelines around best practices and prompting and stuff like that. You know, I added prompt engineer to my resume like three years ago, so I'm very skilled, but that's just me. Um, but in Blueprint, you can actually sort of continually regenerate. So you can take a first pass. Maybe you're missing some steps or it's not quite the right process. All right, go back, edit it, add some more context, make it a little more specific and then regenerate your process. Or do what I do. Put a pin in it.

Make a new one. What's the cost? There's no debt being created. You're just creating a case. It's so easy. Just compare it. See what the Pega want to do here. I would say cost is the resources. I mean, like the querying AI models, every time is the cost.

That's the only cost that I see. But that's. All free. Yeah, but the thing is, even if we get like 2 or 3 good suggestions from the the Blueprint, I think that's more than worth of anything. Mhm. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Awesome.

All right. With that I think we are over time. So we're going to wrap. But I appreciate you guys all joining us. Thank you.