Pega is adding agentic capabilities to all stages of application development. This includes modernizing legacy applications via Blueprints for new applications and developing them. It’s also an extension of its own Pega Process Fabric.
This week, we are at PegaWorld, Pegasystems’ annual event where the company reveals its plans and future direction. It will come as no surprise that agentic AI plays an important role in Pega’s message. However, the company has clearly thought this through. They present a very coherent story in this area. Of course, it throws around all kinds of marketing terms. Pega likes to refer to itself as “The Enterprise Transformation Company.” But if we strip away all the excess baggage, there is still a good story. We’ll explain it below.
It starts with the basics: legacy applications
Last year, PegaWorld Inspire (as it was then still called) focused heavily on Pega GenAI Blueprint. The aim was, and still is, to quickly convert an idea into a visualization of an application. Specifically, it transforms ideas into the workflows of an application. It shows what it will look like when it is actually built. Because Blueprint was not and is not intended for generating code.
The ‘GenAI’ has disappeared from the official name compared to last year. However, Pega is still very much focused on Blueprint. It is also clear that new enterprise applications and the workflows that go with them cannot simply all be visualized and then built from scratch. This is due to organizations having a lot of legacy and so-called technical debt. Research among more than 500 IT decision-makers shows that almost 70 percent of respondents indicate legacy systems and applications are a major obstacle to innovation. Pega is sharing this with the world today.
Pega Blueprint can handle legacy
Organizations will first have to tackle their legacy before they can modernize their applications. New agentic additions to Blueprint should make this possible. It is now possible to add all kinds of documentation, videos, code, and code analyses to Blueprint. It then extracts the necessary information to visualize a modern version of the application. This visualization helps develop applications in a later stage. According to Pega CTO Don Schuerman, agents do all this work behind the scenes at Blueprint: “Pega Blueprint has now become a collection of agents.”
During a briefing we attended prior to PegaWorld, Pega CPO Kerim Akgonul gave a demo of how Pega Blueprint handles a legacy application. He uploaded a video recording of a COBOL application with an audio track of commentary in Blueprint and some other documentation. The agents in Blueprint extracted the various components and created the corresponding workflows. This all happened in a very short amount of time.
The demo looked quite impressive, although Pega will have chosen this example for a reason. It was a fairly straightforward banking application. Notably, this included a very explicit description in the audio track and some comprehensive documentation. The fact that it can quickly identify the various components of the application and turn them into workflows is not that surprising. But more interesting is that it also adds new components. Components that were not in the original application, like AI decisioning. That makes the resulting application not just a modernized version of the same old application.
It is also interesting to learn more about what the impact is of what you feed into Pega Blueprint on the potential output. How would Blueprint have done it without that explicit description, for example? Furthermore, what does uploading more documentation mean for the final result? We will definitely be asking these kinds of questions during PegaWorld this week.
AI Agents to help with application development
Of course, simply visualizing the workflow of a modern application is not enough. You then have to build it. Pega naturally prefers organizations to do this in Pega Infinity. That is, after all, what Pega is ultimately aiming for. With Blueprint, it wants to attract more customers to Infinity and thus keep them within the Pega ecosystem. That does not mean, however, that Blueprint cannot be used as a standalone SaaS service. In fact, that is one of the basic principles of Blueprint, according to Schuerman. Otherwise, they would have integrated it into Infinity.
To make the Infinity suite as attractive as possible to developers, Pega is adding agentic capabilities. For example, the AI developer agent has been further improved. It offers real-time guidance for developers, makes suggestions, and provides instructions. The AI agent can do this because it understands how workflows work, understands context, and knows who the users of the application are. In addition, Infinity automatically creates field mappings between the application and third-party systems. Developers no longer have to do this themselves.
AI agents also make older technologies such as RPA (Robot Process Automation) a lot smarter, according to Pega. There is a new design agent in Robot Studio. It can quickly and automatically setup automations between systems when no API is available. According to Pega, all the developer has to do is indicate the purpose of the specific RPA deployment. The RPA agent then analyzes what is needed and builds the RPA workflow.
Pega Agentic Process Fabric keeps it all together
Deploying AI agents as Pega envisions undoubtedly delivers the necessary benefits. However, it is also important to do this in a responsible manner. With the unpredictability of the models used by the agents, this is not self-evident. That is why Pega is announcing today that it is expanding its own Pega Process Fabric. The new component is called Pega Agentic Process Fabric. This is intended to anchor the entire workflow from Blueprint to Infinity and weave it into an overarching fabric.
The Pega Agentic Process Fabric is primarily about integrating agents into existing environments. According to Matt Healy, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pega, this is a major challenge. It is one of the main reasons why, according to Deloitte research, only 20 percent of organizations that invest in (agentic) AI see a return on their investment.
You can think of Agentic Process Fabric as an extra layer on top of the existing Process Fabric. The existing Process Fabric already made it possible to bring all workflows (Pega and non-Pega) together. Agentic Process Fabric adds the capabilities offered by developments such as MCP (Model Context Protocol) and A2A (Agent-to-Agent). There is a strong emphasis on self-service and the configuration and orchestration of agents. This should make it possible to keep the agents under control.
“Use unpredictability to create new things”
Agentic AI has a pretty fundamental impact on what Pega does and wants to achieve. That much is clear. For now, it’s still pretty conceptual, so we still have a lot of questions about how it will work in practice. But the added value that the “collection of agents” that Pega Blueprint has become can offer is clear. It can enable organizations to move away from their legacy systems and applications more quickly (if they want to, of course). However, it can also create new things.
In that light, Schuerman makes an interesting statement: “The real opportunities of agentic AI lie in its unpredictable nature, in its ability to create new things.” Once a human colleague of the AI agent approves something new, it can be created quickly. In principle, a new application, whether or not it is a replacement for a legacy application, can be built in 40 hours thanks to the AI agents in Pega Infinity, Schuerman promises.
Of course, we will have to wait and see whether all of Pega’s promises can be delivered in practice. However, the fact remains that the company is taking the next step toward its ultimate goal. They call this goal the autonomous enterprise. In such a world, AI agents design, automate, and optimize decisions and workflows. We are not there yet, but Pega is definitely on its way there.
The new features of Pega Blueprint are available to all users starting today. The agentic additions to Pega Infinity and the Pega Agentic Process Fabric will be available in Q3 of 2025. This release is when the next version of Pega Infinity is scheduled.