Maximising AI Impact as the ‘Fire and Hire AI’ Phase Accelerates
17 November
As major technology companies announce fresh rounds of retrenchments, a striking countertrend is emerging – even as headcount shrinks, AI investment is accelerating. Across the Asia-Pacific, executives are openly prioritising AI adoption to boost productivity, protect margins and futureproof operations.
But as David Irecki, Director of Technology and Solutions Consulting at Boomi, puts it, cutting staff alone is not a strategy. “Too often, companies equate efficiency with cost-cutting, and that’s short-sighted,” he says. “Real efficiency comes from optionality – the ability to pivot, scale and innovate quickly. That’s exactly what AI, when built on the right foundation, enables.”
Boomi, a global integration and automation platform, has been helping enterprises across manufacturing, energy, finance and retail connect systems, automate workflows and ready themselves for the next era of AI-driven operations. The company recently commissioned a Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) report, which found organisations achieved a 347% return
on investment and multimillion-dollar gains from consolidating legacy systems, improving data flows, automating processes, and accelerating time to market.
“These results don’t come from deploying one shiny AI tool,” Irecki stresses. “They come from fixing the foundations, modernising legacy systems and giving AI clean, contextual data to work with.”
Pivoting from Retrenchments to Reinvention
According to Irecki, businesses in Southeast Asia – especially amid inflationary pressures and uncertainty – are being pushed to “do more with less.” That has made AI adoption both urgent and risky.
“There’s a fear of missing out,” he says. “Boards are pushing for AI, but many are deploying agents without governance. If you don’t set guardrails from day one, you’re going to create more problems than you solve.”
Yet when companies get it right, the impact can be transformative. One manufacturer in the TEI study automated its lead-to-order workflows, improved vendor interactions and reduced downtime – all of which produced not only efficiency gains but new revenue-generating services.
“The moment you connect your systems, eliminate the manual work and get real-time data, you accelerate everything,” Irecki notes. “For some of our customers, integration times dropped from weeks to days. That’s where the P&L impact really shows up.”
David Irecki, Chief Technology Officer for Asia Pacific and Japan at Boomi
Three Best Practices for AI Success
Boomi highlights three practices that organisations must prioritise to unlock AI’s full value and achieve measurable operational and financial results:
1. Integrate Systems and Eliminate Data Silos AI is only as powerful as the data it can access.
Irecki puts it bluntly: “It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the old world or the new world of AI – if your data quality is poor and your data liquidity is low, AI will not help you.”
Many organisations still operate with siloed applications held together by “spaghetti architecture.” Boomi enables companies to unify these systems, ensure real-time data flow and automate mission-critical processes such as payments, logistics scheduling, account reviews and vendor management.
The result? Faster decisions, fewer errors and smoother operations – all of which translate to improved productivity and reduced labour-intensive tasks.
2. Embed Governance From Day One
As AI agents proliferate, the lack of governance is becoming a serious risk.
“We don’t want to repeat what happened with APIs and API sprawl,” Irecki warns. “With AI, you must be transparent and explainable. There will be a day when an AI decision leads to a lawsuit, and businesses need to show accountability.”
Boomi’s platform provides built-in governance, management and monitoring tools, ensuring responsible AI use, secure data handling and compliance across complex environments.
Governance reduces risk while expanding the safe adoption of AI across business functions.
3. Democratise Innovation with Low-Code Tools
In the past, only IT teams could build automations or integrations. Today, low-code tools allow domain experts – in HR, finance, logistics and beyond – to co-design solutions.
“For us, democratisation isn’t just a slogan,” Irecki says. “If you empower employees to build agents and workflows, you get faster innovation, better adoption and a culture that embraces change.”
And despite fears about AI replacing jobs, Irecki stresses that the opposite is happening.
“AI is making people superhuman,” he says. “It handles the repetitive work so humans can focus on strategy and creativity. AI is meaningless without humans – they are the good teammate.”
AI as the Path Through Economic Uncertainty
With talk of an economic slowdown looming, Irecki argues that companies should adopt AI not as a cost-cutting exercise but as a resilience strategy.
“Boomi gives you the agility to weather the storm,” he says. “Automate the mundane, consolidate the old systems, and get ROI faster. That’s how you prepare for uncertainty.”
In a moment when layoffs dominate headlines, Boomi’s messageis clear: AI’s real power lies not in replacing people, but in building smarter, faster and more adaptive organisations – the kind that emerge stronger, not smaller.
