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Business has changed with business orchestration and automation technology (BOAT) platforms. It’s made business more agile, more competitive, and more effective. By 2030, it’s estimated that 70% of enterprises will consolidate their automation technologies into a platform that orchestrates business processes, agentic AI, bots, integrations, and human actions. These orchestration platforms streamline processes, make smarter decisions, and deliver higher-quality services.
But what are the key benefits and features of BOAT platforms and how do they make a difference?
What’s different about BOAT?
BOAT platforms bring together a range of process capabilities, including automation, low-code automation, intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation (RPA), and collaborative workflow management.
They also integrate process intelligence, AI, cloud technologies, security, governance, and adaptive experience technologies.
Most enterprises have multiple automation capabilities, but these are frequently split across departments or lines of business. There's rarely a centralized way to see across them all, coordinate between them, or govern actors and automations involved. Prior to BOAT, organizations had to stitch together these process solutions in time-consuming and costly ways. According to Gartner, BOAT represents the market’s shift toward consolidating automation capabilities on a single platform.
What are the benefits of BOAT?
Automation is critical for large-scale, complex organizations. The right tools help business teams with everything from simple, individual tasks to complex workflows requiring a mix of automation technologies and human intervention. But frequently, businesses put together their automation ecosystem piecemeal, creating siloed, disjointed processes across IT and other business functions.
BOAT platforms consolidate these technologies, ensuring structured and smooth end-to-end business processes and systems.
What can this do for your business operations? Here are a few critical benefits of business orchestration and automation technologies:
Reduced IT overhead
IT teams have too much on their plates. When a business faces a problem, it’s tempting to add a new solution. But this adds work to teams already stretched thin, from development to configuration to ongoing maintenance.
BOAT brings everything into a single platform. When facing a new challenge or business opportunity, the teams have one place to draw from. A BOAT platform addresses the challenge without forcing you to invest in or lock into another new automation technology (such as better RPA bots or AI agents) or extended contracts. They also reduce the amount of maintenance overhead and operational costs for the IT team.
Controlled costs
Automation tools cost more than their license fees. When one department buys RPA and another buys a specific app for ticketing, each tool brings its own contract, procurement and security review, administrative load, implementation, and onboarding. A single platform removes that duplication. Teams govern every automation the same way, build workflows once, and reuse components instead of rebuilding them for each new project. A BOAT platform also lets teams match each step to the cheapest option that can handle it: rules for predictable decisions, with bots and AI agents saved for the work that needs them. As a result, each new use case costs less to deliver than it would on separate tools.
Greater agility
By centralizing automation and orchestration tools into one place, organizations have a single platform to help them adapt to changing business needs. BOAT platforms offer low-code capabilities, allowing developers to build applications fast using drag-and-drop, prebuilt components. By combining this with other features, such as data fabric, API integrations, and RPA, businesses can more nimbly make changes and take advantage of new opportunities.
Maximizing the value of your investments
You’ve already invested a lot in your tech stack. BOAT platforms accelerate and streamline your other technologies. BOAT weaves together multiple software systems into a cohesive whole, all without extensive integration efforts. Pre-built APIs, MCP integrations with third-party AI, data fabric, and RPA where no other integration is available — connect the data and systems you already have to automate workflows.
End-to-end process orchestration
With traditional approaches, automation often occurs in disconnected islands. Customer service might come to you with a specific problem, which you solve with a focused project. Then, the sales department has a different problem, and you have a separate project for that. This creates downtime risks and reinforces siloed workstreams.
Instead, a BOAT platform addresses processes across the enterprise, allowing you to modernize legacy applications faster and with lower risk. This flexible automation platform sits on top of strategic systems or mainframe apps to provide an orchestration layer without disrupting the core.
What to look for in business orchestration and automation platforms
You’ll only reap the rewards of BOAT with a cohesive, complete platform. So what should a good BOAT platform include?
Process orchestration
Business orchestration is the coordination of actors, objects, and rules in a process. It accelerates work by allocating each task to the right digital worker at the right time, dramatically reducing cycle times and operational friction.
Orchestration reduces maintenance costs and integration complexity by coordinating work through a central process. And orchestration helps manage risk by ensuring important business processes execute securely, reliably, and with complete auditability to meet compliance standards. The best systems offer scheduling, error handling, routing, and data transformation.
Automation tools
Automation is a critical part of BOAT. But automation tools come in multiple forms. To gain transformative value from AI, it must be integrated within a wider platform and framework. A BOAT platform improves operations by embedding agentic AI into existing processes or equipping business users or developers with AI copilots to assist with their work. AI helps with everything from document processing to generating customer service emails to answering questions around data in a conversational assistant.
Robotic process automation (RPA) takes over repetitive tasks, such as interacting with legacy interfaces when no API is available. This offloads manual tasks while eliminating the need to rip and replace legacy technology. By reducing human error and speeding up processes, RPA can significantly enhance operational efficiency.
Low-code design
BOAT partly emerged from low-code application platforms (LCAP). Low-code enables organizations to develop applications faster using prebuilt, drag-and-drop components. These components are tested for security and performance, and with the right platform, they’re often backward compatible.
If you build an application using traditional software development techniques, you’ll have to update code and applications to deal with new security threats as well as rendering across browsers. A BOAT platform handles all this for you, allowing your applications to inherit these changes—reducing your overhead and increasing your operational speed and agility.
Data fabric
A data fabric enables seamless data integration and management across systems. By connecting data from various sources in a unified, virtual architecture, organizations gain a 360-degree view of their data and break down data silos. This helps data flow freely, makes it more accessible to applications, and enables better business decisions.
Data fabric is a critical component of consolidating automation systems. By weaving your data sources into a data fabric, you eliminate the challenge of data silos. This interconnectedness is vital for ensuring other automation and orchestration capabilities have ready access to the data they need to function quickly and effectively.
BOAT in action
Here are two examples of how you could use BOAT to transform your end-to-end processes to meet organizational goals.
Financial services: Loan processing
Loan processing is a complex, multi-step operation involving multiple departments. Every department, from underwriting to compliance, might use their own automation tools like IDP for document processing or AI for risk assessments. This leads to fragmented systems and inefficiencies, risking longer loan cycle times, compliance and audit risk, inconsistent visibility, operational cost, and a scalability ceiling.
A BOAT platform allows seamless integration of systems, orchestrating work across these departments from a single place, using the same tools. For example, the BOAT platform could allow an organization to design a process that intakes a loan submission, routes it via AI to the correct departments, identifies and flags potential issues with AI-based risk assessments, automates document verification with RPA or API connections, and ensures compliance with rule-based workflows. This speeds up processing time, reduces manual errors, and increases customer satisfaction. More importantly, it brings everything under one roof and helps connect your existing systems without having to rip and replace.
Public sector: Enhancing citizen services
Government agencies need to deliver timely and efficient citizen services. But many agencies face the hurdle of siloed legacy systems, dragging down their ability to deliver services quickly to constituents.
Many services, such as contract approval, require multiple touchpoints across teams. BOAT allows these touchpoints to operate more cohesively. Using a BOAT platform, development teams can build process automations that collect data from various sources, orchestrate the process to ensure each department completes its task in a specific order, and automate messaging to provide status updates to citizens. The process intelligence tools can also help the organization identify which pieces of the process are taking too long to complete, then work to eliminate any friction points that slow down service delivery.
BOAT: The next phase in process automation
BOAT technologies are critical in the agentic era. They provide the cohesive infrastructure organizations need to keep pace with market demands and drive innovation and efficiency across their operations. BOAT platforms allow businesses to operate with greater agility and precision and meet the challenges of the moment. By consolidating technology into a single, unified platform, BOAT not only transforms your approach to automation but also ensures better outcomes, more satisfied customers, and a stronger market position.
