Broadcom today is releasing a major new version of its enterprise automation and orchestration product, Automic Automation V26, positioning it as an intelligent control plane.
This release is designed to solve one of the most pressing challenges facing enterprise leaders today: moving AI beyond simple chat and knowledge management and integrating it directly into core business operations.
Processes like core banking, claim processing, utility bill generation, and employee onboarding have historically been managed with automation that is deterministic. Introducing AI agents into this mix without a governance layer risks inviting chaos, as AI is not trained on proprietary business data, nor has it learned the years of human decision-making behaviors embedded in these systems.
Rajeev Kumar, head of product for Broadcom automation, told ITOps Times: “The real challenge is, you’re trying to bring AI to a world which has always been deterministic, a world which has always loved control and governance and auditability and things like that. Think of ERP systems. Think of mainframes. Think of when enterprises were building these business applications on databases, Oracle, SQL Server … they are sitting on-premises. Some of them have moved to the cloud, and you have business processes. They may be messy, they may be siloed, and we have been bringing them together from an orchestration perspective. Now AI is going to exacerbate that problem if a governance layer is not put into place right off the bat, and that governance platform is intelligent control plane that’s automic.”
An orchestration platform with guardrails
Automic Automation V26 functions as an orchestration platform, with guardrails. that ensures auditability, governance, and reversibility. While the industry has previously solved determinism in isolated domains, Kumar explained that the problem in complex business operations remains: how to introduce the required intelligence into a deterministic world in a way that is securely managed through role-based access control (RBAC). Automic acts as a control tower, connecting domain-specific orchestration and AI agents while enforcing governance.
Kumar noted a key differentiator between Automic and orchestration platforms such as OpenClaw and its variants. OpenClaw-type tools typically focus on enhancing the productivity of a digital worker, addressing tasks like responding to emails or parsing data from an Excel sheet to aid daily decisions. In contrast, Automic Automation focuses on what Kumar called the “complex, hairy business processes” and back-office automation that involve hundreds or thousands of tasks running across disparate systems—processes historically involving humans in the loop, dependency management, and failure management. For these mission-critical workloads, simple RAG use cases or digital worker tools fall “significantly short,” he said.
A major feature in V26 is the improvement in automation development, aimed at democratizing the process. Traditionally, building complex automated processes—like pulling data from Salesforce daily, cleansing it, pushing it to a data warehouse, and generating an executive report—required a specialist and could take weeks. With V26, this is simplified through vibe coding. A business analyst who knows the requirements but lacks the technical scripting skills can simply fire off a few prompts, and the tool will generate a plan, object structure, and schedule the workflow automatically. This innovation is designed to boost the productivity of automation builders to match the speed of new developers utilizing modern coding tools.
V26 also includes significant features aimed at data engineers.”Data needs to be moved, the right data, at right time, in the right place” to provide context, Kumar said. Crucially, V26 delivers an agent-less experience, abstracting the technical overhead of installing, managing, and securing agents from the end developers, allowing central teams to offer agents on Kubernetes platforms that automatically spin up and scale down.
Finally, V26 has support for the SAP Clean Core architecture. By supporting Clean Core—SAP’s mandate to avoid customizing the core for easier upgrades—Automic Automation ensures customers don’t need to add technical customizations to integrate it into their new S/4HANA or SAP Rise environments. It also integrates with SAP’s AI platform, SAP Joule, enabling orchestrated workflows that can seamlessly traverse both SAP and Non-SAP environments through a single control plane.
“We are positioning it as an intelligent control plane, something that is going to bring AI orchestration and governance together,” Kumar said, “something which is going to bring the old world and new world together with trust.”