PegaWorld 2025: Pega-as-a-Service & GenAI: The Autonomous Enterprise in Action!

PegaWorld 2025: Pega as a Service & GenAI – The Autonomous Enterprise in Action

Hi everyone! My name is Rahul Ashok. I'm a VP, Cloud Acceleration Group at Pega. I'm joined by. Hi everyone, I'm Stu Smith. I'm the Modernization Success director at Pega. Thank you. So today we're going to talk about how we can help our existing clients that are using Pega get the most value and get to the autonomous enterprise. Now, before I get started, I just wanted to share a short story with you all. So in my role at Pega, I get to meet a lot of our clients.

I get to have the pleasure of going to different places. So I just spent two weeks in Japan and Singapore and Thailand and Indonesia and it sounds really exotic. It was the first time I went went to either of those countries spent very little time there in any of them to really see something. But it was it was amazing. And what I found was that the experiences that our clients are going through who are using Pega today are fairly similar wherever you go.

And there's a lot of questions about AI and AI. Had a really good time talking to all my clients, but I have a confession. So while that's my passion at work for me, I love spending time with my son. My son's name is Johan. He's 11 years old. And for me personally, the time I get to spend with him is very, very valuable. And as I came back from the from my meetings on last weekend, it was a long weekend in the US.

Got back home Saturday and on Sunday I'm still jet lagged and my son turns to me and says, you know, in the last two weeks you were gone. I started playing chess. I'm like, oh, really? Okay. Wow, you started playing chess while I was gone. Great. So let's let's play a game of chess. So on Sunday, I'm having my cup of tea and I'm, you know, I enjoy my English breakfast tea and we're playing chess. I won, I'm really happy to say he just learned it and I won the chess game. I was really happy.

And then we played some tennis and we had a really good time on Sunday. On Monday, which was his first day of March break. I started preparing for this presentation and he looks at me and he goes, what are you doing? I'm like, well, you know, I have this presentation, I'm traveling again. And his face just dropped and he's like, are you are you leaving again? Like you just got back. And that was hard. It was really hard for me.

And it was hard because, you know, it was like a, I don't know, bricks hitting me at that moment because of because I realized that time is, is a completely perishable commodity. Like the time that that's gone is just no longer available. And that time with him that I missed out is really precious.

The reason I tell you this story is that everything we hear about GenAI, everything we hear about all technology, all of that, doesn't really matter if we don't get to spend the time with the things that matter to us. For me, that's my time with my son, for you might be something else. I know Stu's daughter, Ellie, is something Stu really values the time with her.

So as we get into the presentation today, just keep in mind that everything that we do, honestly is about how do we make best use of the time that we have at work and at home. All right. Okay. So all the GenAI hype. You saw everything today. We're talking about all the innovation we're doing. This is a Gartner chart that talks about how we're at this precipice where the AI and automation that the the automation that AI is going to be able to achieve is going to reduce operational costs.

We're in this pivotal moment and AI is going to change everything. Like no matter what you read, that's what you hear out there, right? But how do you do it? How do you achieve it? Well, we're innovating, we're doing a lot around it. And we truly believe to this vision. And that's what our product teams are doing. That's what we at Pega are doing. We've been talking about the autonomous enterprise. I've been at Pega for 20 years. A variety of roles. I've built applications, sold applications.

And I know Alan's vision has always been towards this autonomous enterprise, and it's closer than ever. So I'm super excited about that. Right. What we think it can mean for your business, it's across the board, like whichever part of the business you're doing, whether it's marketing, your customer service operations, back office workflows. We think it's going to change the way things are going to work. But and it's super easy, right, Stu? Like we can this is just easily available.

And people just go to Pega 25 and it's all available immediately, right? Yeah. I have to say, in my experience to many of us, and I'm sure many of you clients out there, your typical experience of using Pega today, this agentic world feels like a galaxy that's far, far away from where you are at the moment. And to that conversation about time, many clients are saying to us, how do I even have the time to think about catching up? This is where the future is. This is where the today is.

As you saw today. But actually how do I get the time to get there. So that's what we're going to talk about and tackle today. All right. So so how do we get here Sue. Like what happens. Like you know I'm sure nobody intends to be that way. Like, what ends up how do we end up there? Yeah I think everyone starts off. They use the best of Pega beforehand.

But I think almost a little known secret is that when you are actually upgrading your versions, you become obviously supported as you upgrade them. But your app, if it's built originally in version six or version seven or early version eight, underneath the covers, underneath the bonnet, as I would say underneath the hood and to the rest it is still a version seven or early version eight app. It is supported. It is not modernized and I think that's a really important point.

So that gap between what you can do with Pega and what you are doing with Pega just gets bigger and bigger and bigger as time goes on. All right. So when we talk to a lot of our clients and, you know, we're we we want to get to the autonomous enterprise. We sat back and we looked at a lot of our clients that are actually going on this journey. What do we need in order to get to the autonomous enterprise? There's a lot to be done. This is not something that's going to happen tomorrow.

We're laying the seeds today. We're laying the foundation today. But you have to build that house on a solid foundation. And for that we have a three step plan. Number one, you've got to get to Pega as a service. That's the future. Our CFO has said to the street that we have going to be having an 80 over 20 rule. We think 80% of our customers are going to be on Pega as a service.

And the reason is if we don't do this, the technology is changing so fast, you just can't keep up on prem, so you have to be on as a service. So before you even think about the autonomous enterprise, you've got to first get to Pega as a service. Second, you got to modernize your application. And we're going to talk a little bit about what that means. And third you got to iterate. So this morning in the in the keynote the Vodafone team talked about how they're thinking big, but starting small.

You got to do it in iterations, and we'll walk through each of these and what we're doing at Pega to help you get there. All right. So before we get started on on, the details of the first one is how to get to Pega as a service. So I've my team and Stu has been a key part of that has been working on that for the last 18 months. We literally have created a playbook on how to do this, and we've done it really, really well. We've had 100% success rate of clients who want to get to Pega as a service.

So can you just walk us through like what that high level steps and stages are? It certainly will. First of all, if you haven't heard the message loud and clear, the future of Pega is on Pega as a service. That's the first and the best thing. And those of you around the room who are already on Pega Customer Service or Pega Cloud as you might know it on, but we prefer to say Pega as a service. You can sit smugly because you are already on that absolute foundation.

But 18 months ago we looked at it and said, we're actually making it too complicated to try and get to the Pegasus service. We knew there was massive benefits in terms of growth and innovation for our clients in terms of massive, massive risk mitigation, mitigation and also in terms of cost savings by being on Pega as a service. But we were we were not helping our clients to get there.

So we streamlined that whole process, working with our clients, with our with our valued partners and obviously Pega investing massively into making sure this was a streamlined and simple process. So now we're only focusing on those must fix items, the things that just will not work once you move to Pega Customer Service. And that is what we're focusing on. That's why we've got success of thousands of applications that we've been able to move across. Thanks, Stu.

So as a reference, about two years ago on on average, a migration to Pega would be a year long project cost millions of dollars. It's now down to 8 to 12 weeks, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on complexity. And we've had massive success on getting our clients over to Pega as a service. So a lot of breakouts today of clients talking about it, but we've really made that step really, really easy. Okay, so that was step one. I think we've got that down pat. Number two modernization.

So Stu, when we say modernization, I've been here for a long time. Everyone defines it differently. How do you what do you think about modernization? I think the important thing is there's multiple lens. We can look at modernization through as Pega. We tend to almost sort of drift towards the technology all the time. But, you know, I'm going to start off with business and it's on the right hand side there. But that's to me that's the most important thing. Pega is a business tool.

It gets the business work done, it gets outcomes driven. So I'm going to start with that. But then also we're going to look at it. You could look at it from an operational lens. What's best practice from today is very different from best practice for two years ago, five years ago etc.. And then of course, the really important underlying technology, there's three independent lenses we could be looking at modernization from.

To me, I think the elephant in the room is we need to be looking at all of them. Modernization is a combination of all three lenses. If we look at it in more detail. Yeah. So I'll cover the business because I'm really passionate about the business side of things. And I clicked it twice. So there's a lot of different things you can look at. But we looked across our customers who modernized over the last five, ten years. I've personally been involved in many large modernization projects.

There's a lot of things we can look at, but the five things and I'm not a big fan of five. I like number three for for, for obvious reasons. But you got to have a clear business vision. You don't need to modernize every single app, but it's got to be the critical application. You've got to have a business sponsor. It's got to matter to the business, otherwise it doesn't go anywhere. You've got to have an AI strategy. Now I, for the sake of AI, is not going to solve anything.

How is that I going to drive to your business goals? Modernization has to start with the business. Otherwise it becomes a pure technology play. And that doesn't help anybody. And that's coming from somebody who spent all his life in technology. So it's critical, critical to do that. Blueprint is changing the way you do this. We're going to actually talk to you and show you some things we're doing with Blueprint. But the 40 day story you heard today from Vodafone, right.

That is the kind of stuff that we want to see. And that requires a change of thinking. It's no longer the old school, six weeks, eight weeks of analysis, or you're sitting down and writing documents on what the requirement needs to be Blueprint is how you collaborate with your business. You're doing real time. That requires a fundamental shift in how you think about building enterprise software. So these are the five things that are critical for us from a business perspective.

So do you want to talk about operations? Yes, operations. In terms of what's the best practice for running Pega today? Obviously very different to what they were a little while ago when you were on Pega as a service, you've got huge capability through PDC, for example, which is telling you it's looking in your apps in real time and telling you how they can be improved. Also, as we've talked about how Pega continues to evolve and that gap is getting further and further apart.

So as new patches come out, as new versions come out, when Pega Infinity 25 comes out in a few months time, are you able to take advantage of that really quickly? Are you able to take the value that comes from that? And of course, underpinning all of that is having a mature center of excellence or center of innovation. That really helps in terms of being able to take those reuse, make sure the best practices are always developed thanks to.

So these things are things that often come up but people don't think about. But operationally, you've got to be ready in order to get to the autonomous enterprise and OK. Let's face it. Right. Underlying all that is technology. Now you've bought Pega or clients are using Pega. Not because they like coding, it's because they Pega has really powerful out of the box capability.

The biggest mistake I see people making with Pega is you've bought a solution for a reason, and then you completely customize it, and that just kills the value from a business perspective. So you've got to minimize customization. You've got to use the case and the next best action designer components. You've got to embrace low code. So Rabobank has done a couple of sessions at PegaWorld in terms of how they've completely changed the way they do Pega development. They've embraced.

They don't have many lsas and sza's their business people. The BA's do a lot of the configuration work in App Studio. It's a very different way of working, but that's not what everyone has really adopted. And then automated testing is huge. Like I have talked to many, many customers, I don't think I've talked to all of them, but my estimate is less than 20% of our customers today are doing automated testing. The ones that are doing automated testing are able to do seamless updates.

They're able to take in all the latest features, they're releasing functionality in a completely different cadence and driving business value compared to anyone else. If you don't have this, no matter how much GenAI you get, if your testing cycle is six months, you're not going to achieve anything like it really doesn't matter. So these things that we talk about, these these three areas and five each, the purpose of this is to get your foundation right.

Because without that you're not going to really get to the autonomous enterprise. So this is the foundation. Today that those clients who are on Pega as a service and they have minimal customization, the average time for them requesting a new version to actually putting it and being live on that version is now less than a month. That's incredible compared to where we were a few years ago. Yeah. And you know. I have been at Pega 20 years.

I started building Pega apps on 4.2 for anybody that even knows what that is. if you if that's what you've done and you look at Pega now, it's actually a very different. It's completely different and completely changed. So you've got to shift the mindset and embrace what the what the latest, latest stuff is. So Stu, there's a lot of things here right. Like how does how do people think about collapsing that or thinking about that. Yeah.

Importantly, I think if we look at it just through one lens, we're going to fail. It's as simple as that. We've got to look at it through those three different lenses. And if we plot them all out there in terms of where we are and we realistically look at our as is at this moment in time, where are we in terms of driving that value? We've also obviously got access to a vision. Where could we be in the agentic world that you just saw at the keynote today? And we can soon start building that up?

And the the message here is that any effectively space that's not filled in here is lost value as value to your business. That's being lost. By the way, we have this diagram. Those of you who want to start thinking this way, we can make it available. But this is an important way to understand where's value being lost at this moment in time. Then we can start doing something about it. Thanks, Stu.

So the purpose here is to give you and every client, and we've done this internally for like about 30 or 40 of our clients, where we've kind of mapped their journey as to where they are. The purpose of this is not everything is going to be five for everybody. The purpose of an exercise like this is okay. There's a lot we could be doing going back to our concept of time, where should we be spending our time to get the most value? And there may be other areas that you guys have.

Nothing is ever perfect. We reserve the right to change this little spider chart, but this is where we think you need what you need. Like start thinking about in order to drive towards that modernization area okay. All right. So we talked about the future. We talked about this galaxy far, far away. I believe that GenAI can totally change the way we build a hyperdrive engine to get us there. That's that's what we want to get to.

So we've been working with our product team and this is still in alpha. So I'm not quite ready for release yet. But we're working on something called an application signature tool. The name might change. And we'll walk through how this tool will allow you to streamline and save time to modernize your older Pega application. As we started thinking about this, there were certain foundational principles that we wanted to establish.

We want to make sure that the discovery or finding out what your apps are doing today is automated. We want it to be AI assisted. We want to make sure that there's time and cost savings, and we want consistency and repeatability. Every time I've gotten involved in any sort of migration or modernization exercise, it's taken us months and months and months of analysis, of discussion, of talking, of figuring out what is that application Doing that is not the way of the future.

All the GenAI innovation we're doing should be able to get that out of the system automatically. So that's one of our fundamental tenets. Number two, you're not going to take an app that was built 20 years ago and modernize it to Constellation and then do the exact same thing that you were doing. That is that is a recipe for failure. You might as well not do anything. So as you reimagine those apps, you've got to be able to think about how do you automate? How do you optimize?

How do you streamline? So that's the second kind of focus in here. You've got to start using the out of the box features like Stu talked about. How does Constellation streamline. How do you use App Studio. How do you use Blueprint. That's got to be part of it and it's got to be Agentic AI ready. So if you build it using those best practices, as Kerim said on the stage today, it's going to be automatically agentic ready. That's that's what you get with it.

And third, look, you've spent a lot of time. You spent a lot of money. You spent a lot of effort on building those applications. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. How do we reuse those assets from those applications? That is that is actually a lot of value. Things like integrations, things like data models you don't want to your APIs are not going to change, but your case structure is going to change. Some of your data components might be the same.

So as we are thinking about modernization, we asked our product team. We worked with them, and we want to be able to build this approach that allows you to incrementally modernize. Yeah. So the way we are thinking about this is that this we've created an application signature tool, Alpha. Right now. The idea is that it's a product zip. You install it in your production or as near to production environment as you can. There we go. It is able to extract out the key assets of the application.

This does not require your app, the application you run this tool on to be on Pega 25 or 24. You can run this on any version of Pega. That's our intent. We are actively trialing this out right now on an internal application. So we have an application called System Product. System of record, originally built on Pega four has been tolerance upgraded to 8.24 currently, but it's in essence a really old Pega application. We were able to install this tool.

It's going to be able to extract out the key components of that application, so we know what case types are, even if it's the old work style work object, it knows what flow rules exist. From the production deployment. We're able to understand the class structure, the data structure, the rules, the decisions, and extract all that component out, that all that is then going to be imported into a JSON export. That JSON will then get imported over into Blueprint.

And this is what functionality Kerim showed today, where Blueprint can now import. What you now have is a version of your current application in Blueprint with your assets all identified. All right, now this is the time where step two, you've got to now work with your business. So our goal here is to run a test drive where you're able to take this, have that exercise, do the reimagination and then you're able to import it. So the import from Blueprint will go to your same stack.

You're able to identify what components you want to use. And now you have your modern application. So that's that's what we are actively building out right now. And am I right in thinking this would be the Blueprint delivered path? This is the blueprint delivered path. So I personally am super excited by this. I think this is something a lot of our clients could be using and needing.

And as opposed to spending months and months and lots of times figuring it out showcases how GenAI can really make our life easy. Stu, can you walk us through like what? How this would actually kind of work? Yeah, I think the important thing is why is it reemerging? Why is it not a rebuild? Well, again, as we said, because we are using all of that investment you have had in that what we call the heritage app that's sitting there. So yes, we're talking about doing this on Pega as a service.

Have I said it all today? The future of Pega.com Pega Customer Service. If not, I'll say that one more, one more time. So this is on Pega as a service, clearly with the latest Pega GA that we'll be sitting there at the bottom Platform then we would have sitting on top of that. Next please. The heritage app. The old app. The old rule types that are sitting there. So they are still of use to you. Think about the integration.

Think about the reports and think about all of those rule types that you would still want to use. And we're not chucking them out. So they are they're sitting there available to us. But almost from day one you have access to the next layer, the the modernized application that's come from Blueprint sitting on top. The idea here is to give you the best of both worlds. You have access to the new app with case types, with all the foundations that you expect from modern Pega you're agentic ready.

You have what I call the modern UX Constellation that's it's just become the normal Pega UX moving forward. Constellation sitting there, it's all available effectively to you from day one, but you've still also got access to the heritage app, the rule set sitting there that you can reuse as and when required. If you go to the next slide please. So over time, one of the first things that you would do is you would not be using almost you would effectively would be removing the work types.

Again, work types are not not needed in a modern app. So we're placing those with case types. You don't need UIKit because again, we've replaced that with modern UX or Constellation. And now you can have the ability to incrementally, over time to suit you, start salvaging and reusing and taking those rules from the the lower layer, refactoring them and putting them in the upper layer. And this is something that can iteratively happen over time that works for you.

Now, we think this approach is pretty exciting in terms of a way, in terms of going to that hyperdrive, of getting our clients to that agentic modern future compared to where they are at this moment in time. This is something that's going to take so much time away in terms of driving that value. Yeah. Thanks, Stu. So the the things in red there, right. Just to clarify, there may be things that are not modern. And then over time you start replacing it.

So in this example the black the work types in UIKit you're no longer using. But then as you do that iterative approach, you are getting rid of the older stuff. You're extracting it out. You're building the right reusable layer and structure. This is all the plumbing and everything that you build in case type is automatically agentic ready. So that's that's what you get when you follow this approach. That's right.

And our hope is that obviously at some point whenever you can take away those red rules completely and you're just left with entirely modern app that's sitting there. Yeah. All right. So I'm sure there's some questions on that. And we'll open it up for Q&A in just a moment. Now this all sounds good. And I just wanted to share that we actually have clients. I don't know if some of these folks are in the room now, but Prime and Natwest had some sessions this morning.

There's a session right after this that ANZ is going to talk about their journey to as a service as well as modernization. And then First Citizens is talking tomorrow about it too. They're not quite using that third step that we talked about yet because that's absolutely in Alpha. We're trialing it internally and with one of our clients right now. I think we're going to have more beta clients coming in July. If anyone's interested, you can. You can reach out to us and let us know if you want to.

This is the first public announcement. This is the first public announcement of this functionality. We have not talked about this to anybody yet. So this is literally the first time we're mentioning that. And that's kind of the end of our presentation. I'm hoping to have more Q&A if you want to know more. If you want to partner with us, just reach out to your account executive. We have an email address modernization at pega.com. You can reach out to us. That and the purpose here is innovation.

I think GenAI is at a state where we're still learning. Everyone's figuring this out, and we'd love to co-innovate with our clients to get get there. All right. Thank you. Questions? Or how do you want us to ask questions? Oh, just come up to the mic. Hey, thanks. So we're evaluating Pega as a service as a first step into Pega. Okay, so we're not a Pega customers yet for a regulated entity or a bank. I saw first citizens.

There is first citizen already on Pega as a service, or is it something that they're working on? I think they've now migrated. They're running. They were on prem, now they're on as a service. That's great. So what are the challenges that you see from a banking institution to start using Pega as a service, where you are hosting an entire solution with data coming from a bank, four walls to your ecosystem, your VPC. Yeah.

What are the challenges that you have heard of and how have you overcome some of those challenges? Are we really interested in all that? Sure, I'll take that. Yeah. So I think the answer to that question is, if you think about the type of clients that Pega typically has that are large banks, the large government organizations, etc., and the majority of our clients being on Pega and ServiceNow. So there's always questions of regulatory questions, compliance questions that come up.

Um, every single one of our clients has those deep. We're special. We need to make sure we can't afford anything to go wrong. The fact that it is a single VPC that's dedicated to yourselves is one of the key tenets to our service there. But we are always confident that whatever security questions or whatever compliance questions, we've got a A sheet as long as our arm in terms of how many compliance, etc., we have FedRAMP high for the right clients under that side of things.

You know, we can answer those questions. Our architecture team also who report into Rahul Kak, are absolutely experts at having that level of deep conversations with your security people, the compliance people, risk risk personnel to get to the bottom of all of those questions that we can ask. And we've even got some questions that come almost just off the shelf. Just typical FAQs. Here's things you're definitely going to ask us. So let's speed up the process by starting to get them to you.

So it's one of those things that if we can get in front of a whiteboard, it's so much easier than trying to do it over email, but that's what the architects love and welcome that conversation whenever. So. So the good thing is that you can see a bunch of those are banks and and banks. We've. A lot of them are now Lloyds has been a bank for a while. They've been running on Cloud. We've got a lot of banking customers in Canada, Australia like all the regions. A lot of the specifics.

Are been answered. We don't store a lot of your back end data directly on cloud either. So it's APIs we. Connect with them. We have direct connect or other secure mechanism through AWS GCP connected so all. Of that we work with your security and networking and connectivity folks to get that done. Yeah I just. As Rahul said Lloyds Banking Group are probably our poster child for it. They were one of the first to move over. They've been on there for many, many years now.

Um, they are almost a better advert and sometimes than. Own salespeople. They are just fantastic about what the what the benefits of it are. So, um. Absolutely. Let's have more conversations. Any more questions? Sure. My question is pertaining to the application signature tool that we talked about. Um, as a bank, as an employee of bank, um, what I do believe is or what is the sequence of, um, the work here that means do I need to install this application signature tool first, get the Blueprint and then it moves to Pega SaaS. Or do I have to, um, move it to Pega SaaS and then do do all of this? Great. Great question. So in this case the first step is moving it to Pega Customer Service. The Pega SaaS, as you say, is the very first step to get everything there. The application remains as is.

And that side of things, this is a way of you doing the modernization, the phase two element on top of that. So rather than you iterating and taking, you know, automated testing and the Constellation and all those elements which would take a while. This enables you to sort of leapfrog all of those steps and start off with a brand new, reimagined version of that app. But yes, the foundation would be on Pega as a service in the first place.

And the next question I have is how does this affect the data that is already there for the existing application of that? So how do we how do we handle the data part of this? So because the app's been migrated as is, it's still available to you. Because in that case, yeah. Otherwise if you were. When it's moved to Pega SaaS, the data will also get migrated. Precisely. The the relevant data has been migrated at that stage. Yeah, we take care of that as part of the migration.

So we have a team and we move all your data. We do all the conversion, we do all of that. That's part that's included as part of the service offering. What I'm trying to understand is from the application perspective, once my application is converted, how do I move the data to the new structure now? So that that that's a that's a great that's a great question. I don't have a direct answer to that because we're actually experimenting that right now.

Depends on how much of the data component changes. Having done such projects in the past, my personal preference is leave the old data alone. This is considered this a brand new application. See what you need to do, let it ramp down and then start it anew. Because doing that data mapping exercise, the business value I don't feel is there.

Like having done that, like I've done that on both sides in the past, and I've found it just better to let it let it kind of wind down and then start your new stuff on the new one. Thank you. Yeah. Any more questions? Okay. Okay. Well, good. Thank you for your time, everyone. Really appreciate it. Again, if anyone wants to come up and ask questions. Yeah. Not a public forum. Please come and see us. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you.