Automation has been with us far longer than most people realize. In fact, its story begins not in the digital age, but centuries ago: looms revolutionized textile production in the 1700s, and windmills automated grain grinding and water pumping as far back as the 9th century.
Fast forward to the industrial and digital eras — thermostats in the 1880s began regulating temperature automatically, personal digital assistants in the 1980s managed contacts and calendars, and in the 2000s, early RPA scripts “screenscraped” websites to move data between systems.
Then came the modern waves: chatbots took on customer service tasks, and in 2023, generative AI models defied expectations by automating entire categories of content creation overnight.
Now, we stand at the next frontier: agentic systems. Unlike generative AI, which produces outputs, agentic orchestration enables AI to take purposeful action — initiating, adapting, and completing workflows across multiple systems, all while coordinating with humans in the loop. This is the leap from “intelligent tools” to “intelligent partners” in business execution.
Each chapter in this evolution raised the bar for what we considered possible. But as impressive as these advances have been, they’ve largely focused on isolated tasks. The future requires a way to orchestrate across systems, workflows, humans, and AI agents — not just automate what’s in front of us in siloes. That’s the promise of Agentic Business Orchestration.
Agentic Business Orchestration: What it is (and isn’t)
At its core, agentic business orchestration is rooted in a single platform that brings together three essential capabilities:
- Process intelligence to understand and map how work flows across systems and teams.
- Workflow orchestration to connect people, data, applications, and AI agents into a governed execution layer.
- Generative AI assistants and low-code application development to rapidly create purpose-built solutions that extend and adapt business processes.
In an AI-led, human-in-the-loop model, these elements work together as one — ensuring that organizations can automate at scale, adapt in real-time, and still maintain oversight and accountability.
This is what makes Agentic Business Orchestration different from other technologies that may sound similar but fall short when it comes to solving today’s enterprise challenges:
Agentic Business Orchestration vs. RPA:
- RPA automates repetitive, rule-based tasks like extracting invoice data from PDFs or resetting user passwords.
- Agentic Business Orchestration orchestrates end-to-end outcomes — for example, an entire employee onboarding journey where AI agents handle document collection and system provisioning, while HR managers step in only when human judgment is required.
Agentic Business Orchestration vs. Generative AI:
- GenAI creates content or insights, like summarizing policies or drafting a customer service email.
- Agentic Business Orchestration operationalizes those outputs in context — for example, integrating an AI-generated response directly into a support workflow, routing escalations automatically, and logging every step for compliance.
Agentic Business Orchestration vs. iPaaS:
- iPaaS connects systems but typically stops at data integration.
- Agentic Business Orchestration drives business outcomes by embedding integrations within governed workflows, tracking KPIs, and enabling solutions that go beyond “pipes and plumbing.”
Agentic Business Orchestration vs. Agentic orchestration (point solutions):
- Agentic orchestration tools can direct AI agents, but they often lack deep connections to enterprise systems or governance safeguards.
- Agentic Business Orchestration brings enterprise-grade orchestration — adding integration into core business systems (ERP, CRM, HRIS), governance and compliance controls, and KPI alignment to ensure outcomes are strategic, not just tactical.
It’s not about adding another point tool to the stack. It’s about consolidating technology, embedding AI in governed ways, and enabling dynamic, orchestrated execution between core business systems and AI agent ecosystems that can rise to the complex challenges businesses face today.
I believe this… Nintex believes this… but so do industry experts.
Gartner launched a new category called “Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies” or “BOAT,” which is defined as “a consolidated software platform that delivers enterprise process automation by enabling capabilities including orchestration of business processes, enterprise connectivity, low-code development, and agentic automation.”
Forrester is launching a new category called “Adaptive Process Orchestration,” which is defined as “an automation platform that uses AI agents and nondeterministic control flows in addition to traditional deterministic control flows to meet business goals, perform complex tasks, and make autonomous decisions.”
And a recent report from MIT found that despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment, most generative AI initiatives fail to deliver not just measurable business value but any business value: 95% of organizations are getting zero return.
The path forward is clear: organizations need a consolidated platform for process orchestration and solution development to unlock ROI on AI investment.
The realities of business today require an efficiency solution
Business and IT leaders, especially CIOs and CFOs, are navigating one of the most complex operating environments in decades. Software sprawl has left most organizations juggling hundreds of applications, many of them overlapping, underutilized, or siloed from one another. What once felt like choice has turned into chaos — duplication of effort, rising license costs, and data scattered across disconnected systems.
At the same time, the pressure to consolidate and simplify is intensifying. Economic uncertainty has put margins and efficiency under a microscope. Every dollar spent on technology is expected to deliver measurable value, yet legacy systems and accumulated technical debt continue to slow down modernization and cloud adoption. For many leaders, the result is a growing workload with fewer resources, and a widening gap between strategy and execution.
And then there’s AI. Every boardroom conversation now includes it, but the reality on the ground is messier. Organizations are racing to experiment with generative AI, but too often those pilots lack governance, fail to integrate with core systems, or struggle to demonstrate ROI. Instead of driving outcomes, they create new risks and stifle efficiency.
This is the backdrop for agentic business orchestration and directly addresses these challenges by:
- Consolidating fragmented processes into a single orchestration layer that cuts across systems and silos.
- Embedding AI with governance to help ensure security, compliance, auditability, and human oversight so AI delivers value without risk.
- Modernizing without rip-and-replace by using low-code app development to extend and connect existing investments.
- Scaling outcomes across the enterprise, from finance and HR to customer service and operations, in ways that align directly to business strategy.
This is how leaders can move beyond one-off automation projects and into orchestrated success — where every process, system, and AI agent is aligned to the outcomes that matter most.
Experiment fast, scale with confidence.
Our vision for agentic business orchestration is rooted in this mantra. We want users to be able to take optimized workflows and easily build solutions that unlock efficiency across their organizations. But we also want to ensure that their innovation is done with the necessary governance and oversight in place. Think vibe-coding but with the proper guardrails that enterprise-grade solutions require.
And I firmly believe that Nintex is well-positioned to be the agentic business orchestration platform for mid-sized and enterprise businesses. We’ve been building toward this moment for years.
Nintex started as a native process engine with a bold vision: to create powerful process automation tools. From the very beginning, we focused on helping both developers and business leaders simplify how work gets done. Nintex quickly became trusted in the early days of digital collaboration, delivering workflows and document automation that organizations could depend on. Fast forward, we’ve evolved into the possibility engine as our platform has expanded beyond process automation to include forms, workflow, apps, data, document generation, and e-sign.
We are now taking the next massive stride: evolving Nintex into an AI-native platform on which rich solutions can be generated at scale, but with governance at its core that reflects business realities. Nintex will be much more than just a platform for automation — it is becoming the central operational layer where people, applications, manual processes, and AI agents work together under governance and control to drive strategic business outcomes.
This is just the beginning
At Nintex, we believe agentic business orchestration is the natural next era of digital transformation. By bringing together low-code app development, workflow orchestration, and AI agents in a single, governed platform, we’re empowering businesses to move beyond automation toward intelligent, adaptive, enterprise-wide orchestration.
This is not just evolution. It’s a new way of working, in which organizations can confidently unify their people, systems, and AI to achieve more.
The organizations that thrive in the coming years won’t be those that automate more tasks. They’ll be those who understand their processes, orchestrate intelligently, and align technology with strategy to deliver outcomes at scale.
Is your business ready to unlock possibility through agentic business orchestration?
