Appian Recognized as a Leader in the first-ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (BOAT).
You’ve made investments in automation. Yet the promised enterprise-wide transformation remains elusive. Your TCO is creeping up, and despite owning a portfolio of tools, your most critical business processes—and the tools that automate them—are still disconnected.
If an isolated automation landscape is holding you back, you’re not alone. Gartner research finds that 81% of organizations use more than six different tools for automation, leading to fragmentation and complexity.1
This complexity isn't a failure of the technology in and of itself. It’s the limitation of adopting separate vendors for technologies like robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA), and low-code application platforms (LCAP) over time.
Overlapping automation capabilities are forcing market consolidation
There is a strong push from enterprise leaders for more integrated automation solutions.
72% of enterprise applications leaders want consolidated platforms with orchestration, connectivity and agentic capabilities to improve business outcomes." 2
And while only 5% of organizations are adopting consolidated automation platforms today, Gartner predicts that will number will rise to 70% by 2030.3
In response to this market shift, Gartner® has released a new consolidated market category: business orchestration and automation technologies (BOAT).
BOAT platforms move your business forward
BOAT platforms excel at business process automation for case management, complex workflows or straight through processing, automation of tasks, and processing unstructured documents or data.
“Business orchestration and automation technology platforms unify process orchestration, connectivity and agentic features to enable enterprisewide automation.” 3
For your business, BOAT platforms like Appian translate directly to:
Reduced TCO: Consolidate vendor contracts and eliminate the hidden integration and maintenance costs of a piecemeal approach.
Accelerated time-to-value: Build and deploy enterprise-grade solutions faster on a single, governed platform.
Mission-critical resilience: Ensure dynamic scaling, high availability, and disaster recovery for your most complex and regulated processes.
We are proud to announce that Appian has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for BOAT.
Appian offers unified BPA, RPA, IDP, case management, and AI agents in a single low-code platform. All of these tools are fed and informed by data fabric, which provides a single, unified view of business data that allows you to orchestrate work across your enterprise without complex migration or disruption.
Prepare for the agentic future
While BOAT platforms address the pressing need to simplify an overly complex automation landscape, this market shift isn’t just about efficiency. It's about building an intelligent, autonomous enterprise.
Even though most businesses are still in early stages of AI agent adoption, agents in the very near future will excel at automating real work in business processes, like processing unstructured data, providing decision assistance, and managing knowledge. But they require a powerful orchestration layer to be effective at an enterprise scale.
Appian is the platform to orchestrate this future. We provide the command and control center to build, deploy, manage, and govern AI agents safely within your most critical workflows, turning the promise of AI into business outcomes you can measure. And we’re not stopping there. Our roadmap is focused on enhancing capabilities for multiagent orchestration to prepare your business for a more agentic future.
If your automation strategy has hit its ceiling, the next level of performance requires a new model.
Download your complimentary copy of the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for BOAT to review the full strategic analysis.
1. Ray and Guttridge, “Quick Answer: Beyond RPA, BPA, and Low Code — The Future Is BOAT,” Gartner, 18 September 2025.
2. Gartner Peer Community One Minute Insight — Do Automation Tools Need to Be Consolidated?
3. Ray, Villa, et al, “Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies,” Gartner, 15 October 2025.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Appian.
