RESOURCES

In this episode of “Integration. Redesigned,” our host, CMO Cait Porte, talks with Fabricio Inocêncio, Head of Education & AI at Digibee, about the role of AI in integration. The discussion covers Digibee’s innovative approach – leveraging AI in integrations and streamlining development processes. They discuss the impact of AI on the developer community and potential future directions for AI in both business and personal tasks. As Digibee aims to simplify tasks and empower development teams, the episode also highlights how AI has been a natural evolution for Digibee to achieve this goal.

More on this topic

Full transcript

CAIT PORTE

Hello and welcome back to Integration. Redesigned. I’m your host, Cait Porte, and it’s wonderful to have Digibee’s Head of Education and AI on the podcast today. Welcome back, Fabricio.

FABRICIO INOCENCE

Hi Cait, thanks for having me.

CAIT PORTE

Thanks for being here. Today we're going to talk about AI as it relates to integration, and you guys have been doing a lot of work around integration. Digibee has been releasing and will be releasing some amazing new AI-related features. To start, tell us about the process that you and your team use to come up with innovative ideas around AI.

FABRICIO INOCENCE

Okay, perfect. When we think about product innovation, it's fundamentally about identifying and addressing unmet pain points and needs, and there's a lot of opportunity there, right? But when we see some technology emerging, we have other opportunities for a more technology-driven approach. What we're doing now is re-evaluating the existing problems that we've already identified with customers and figuring out how we can approach new solutions to those problems with deep learning, machine learning techniques, and AI. This can be an opportunity to reshape those existing problems with completely new things and how we can find different solutions and rethink the features that we've already planned.

Imagine what could not be done before smartphones. Just because we have smartphones, all the products and innovations that have been created are just addressing existing pain points, but with a different solution because we have new technology in place. That’s basically what we are doing now. What can we do differently with AI? Addressing an existing pain point, existing unmet needs of our customers.

CAIT PORTE

I think it’s really important when you think about the advent of technology to help empower others. One of the things we talk about a lot is how transformative AI is here at Digibee, specifically on this podcast and of course in the news. We’ve launched new functionality around documentation for a number of integration flows, making it easier to communicate what a process is doing, how it’s doing it, and why.

Tell us a little bit about what AI means to Digibee. When you think about integration and AI, what makes you excited or anxious about the future?

FABRICIO INOCENCE

Great. I think AI is part of the natural evolution of Digibee. When we look at why Digibee and we see all the things we can solve to reduce the friction for developers in building integrations, because alternatively they have a lot of hard work in coding and because we have a low-code platform and we make that easier. The next step when we see AI-assisted products is a natural evolution.

AI is definitely part of the future for Digibee as we see that we can add more capabilities and make things easier for developers. Some of the examples that you mentioned and things that we're planning, for example, integrations are confusing and complex. How can we provide clarity so that developers can make better decisions around integration? That's one of the reasons why we provide an AI assistant so that users can retrieve information about how to use the product, but also how they can retrieve information about the integration so that they can better understand what's happening in the integration. We don't want AI to be like a black box. They need to audit it, they need to understand what's going on. That's why we use AI for that purpose, not to make it more complex.

Finally, of course, when we see this fusion making life easier for developers, how can we help them design and build the integration? With intelligent recommendations, with optimizations, but always in the sense that we make suggestions but it is the developers who have the final decision on what should be done in a specific integration context.

CAIT PORTE

Of course, there has to be human interaction. You touched on the developer and the importance of aligning AI with the developer by creating an AI assistant. We know that AI can be and will be transformative. Where do you see AI in the development community in the next 6 to 18 months?

FABRICIO INOCENCE

Interestingly, because we’ve seen a lot of great things being developed in code generation. Vendors are doing a great job at this, but the development community is realizing that, “Okay, I can speed up my coding process, but reviewing and debugging is still painful,” especially when it comes from AI. I think this is a great opportunity for vendors, and I mean co-pilots, code whisperers, and AI code generation, to focus on how AI can make reviewing the debugging phase less painful from now on. AI can generate code, but users still have to verify what the AI did. “Okay, I still need to verify, but how can I easily verify that?” I think that’s going to be the next thing, right? How can AI-generated code be easily surfaced and debugged by the user?

CAIT PORTE

I think that really means adding AI as a co-pilot or partner in that process, rather than letting AI drive everything, and I'm, of course, very excited about where we're headed.

When I think of AI, of course, I think of it in the business sense, but I also think of it in the personal sense. One thing I’ve used AI for recently is generating a grocery list and meal plan for the week. If you could do anything with AI, what would it be?

FABRICIO INOCENCE

So Cait, I would definitely create a digital twin of myself. So imagine an AI version of myself, equipped with all my skills, knowledge, and even my jokes, so that I can delegate some tasks to this digital twin, and still free up time. So how can I delegate to myself and free up time at the same time? So to me, that's amazing.

All jokes aside, that's actually what AI is doing, right? Climbing the cognitive ladder, but really step by step and task by task. We can already delegate tasks, right? But we're still delegating under adult supervision. But when we have something called AGI, artificial general intelligence, and that comes out, then probably this digital twin product of ourselves might be possible, right? But we're still seeing it happen that way. Right?

CAIT PORTE

AI is still in its early days. Of course we want to make sure we're policing what's going on, right? Taking a little bit of care in how we use it, but always fun to dream about.

Fabricio, thank you very much for participating today.

FABRICIO INOCENCE

Thank you. Thank you, Cait.

CAIT PORTE

Thank you all for participating. This was another episode of Integration. Redesigned. We'll talk to you next time.

‍