What is BOAT (Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies)? Explaining Gartner’s new category

If you work in enterprise IT or process automation, you’ve likely spent the last few years juggling a growing stack of point solutions: an RPA tool here, a low-code platform there, an integration layer stitching it all together, and now a wave of AI agents on top. Each tool solves a piece of the puzzle. Almost none of them talk to each other well.

Gartner has given this problem — and its emerging solution — a name: Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies, or BOAT. It’s one of the most consequential new categories in enterprise software, and if you’re evaluating a Pega platform or any enterprise automation investment, understanding what BOAT actually means will change how you frame the conversation internally.

 

What exactly is BOAT?

Gartner defines business orchestration and automation technologies as a consolidated software platform that delivers enterprise process automation by combining several capabilities that used to live in separate tools: orchestration of business processes, enterprise connectivity, low-code development, and agentic automation. In practice, a BOAT platform pulls together functionality that historically came from distinct markets — business process automation (BPA), low-code application platforms (LCAP), integration platform as a service (iPaaS), intelligent document processing (IDP), robotic process automation (RPA), collaborative workflow management, and document management, into a single, unified environment.

Gartner introduced the term in 2024 and formalized it in 2025 with the first Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies, evaluating twenty vendors. The core idea: rather than asking “how do we automate this individual task,” organizations are increasingly asking “how do we orchestrate processes, people, systems, and AI agents to reliably deliver a business outcome, end to end.”

That shift matters because it’s not just a rebrand of existing automation categories. It reflects a genuine architectural change: from tool sprawl to a single coordination layer that sits underneath the automation, integration, and AI tools an enterprise already runs.

 

Why did Gartner create a new category at all?

Most large organizations didn’t set out to build fragmented automation landscapes; it happened gradually. An RPA rollout here to eliminate manual data entry. A low-code app there to digitize a specific workflow. An integration platform to connect systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Add generative AI and autonomous agents into that mix, and the fragmentation compounds: without a coordination layer, agentic AI tends to introduce more governance risk and inconsistency rather than less.

BOAT platforms are Gartner’s answer to that fragmentation. Analysts project that by 2030, a large majority of enterprises will consolidate onto a single orchestration platform that coordinates business processes, AI agents, bots, APIs, and human actions — a sharp increase from where most organizations stand today.

 

What capabilities define a BOAT platform?

Not every automation vendor qualifies. Gartner’s criteria center on a handful of core capabilities working together, natively, on one platform:

• Business process orchestration — coordinating multi-step processes across systems, teams, and time, including processes that pause, resume, and adapt.
• Enterprise connectivity — integrating with the core systems (ERP, CRM, legacy applications) where enterprise data actually lives.
• Low-code development — enabling both business and IT teams to build and adapt workflows without a full custom-development cycle.
• Agentic automation — orchestrating AI agents alongside deterministic, rules-based automation, so AI-driven decisions happen within a governed, auditable process rather than as an isolated black box.

Case management, robotic process automation, and intelligent document processing typically sit inside or alongside a BOAT platform as supporting capabilities, rather than as the primary differentiator.

 

How does BOAT differ from RPA, BPM or iPaaS?

This is the question most technical buyers ask first, and it’s a fair one. BOAT doesn’t replace these categories so much as absorb and unify them.

• RPA automates individual, repetitive tasks by mimicking user actions on existing interfaces. It’s powerful for narrow automation but was never designed to orchestrate an end-to-end business outcome.
• Traditional BPM modeled and managed structured processes, but rarely incorporated native AI decisioning or the kind of enterprise-wide connectivity a modern BOAT platform assumes.
• iPaaS connects systems and moves data between them, but focuses on integration rather than orchestrating the business logic and human/AI actions that sit on top of that data.

A BOAT platform is what you get when these capabilities — plus AI agent orchestration — are designed to work together from the ground up, rather than bolted together after the fact.

 

Where Pega fits in the BOAT landscape

This is where the category stops being an abstract analyst term and becomes directly relevant to any organization already running, or considering, Pega. In its inaugural Magic Quadrant for Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies, published in October 2025, Gartner named Pega a Leader, based on its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute. In the accompanying Critical Capabilities report, Pega received the highest scores of the twenty evaluated vendors in two specific use cases: Case Management and Enterprise Task and Process Automation.

That’s a meaningful signal for anyone evaluating a Pega platform for a new orchestration initiative: independent analyst research is confirming what many long-time Pega customers already know from experience — that the Pega Infinity platform was architected for exactly the kind of unified, governed orchestration that BOAT describes. Recent additions like Pega Blueprint, which turns business goals directly into agent-driven workflow designs, and Pega’s Agentic Process Fabric, which coordinates AI agents across systems and applications, extend that foundation into the agentic AI era without sacrificing the auditability and control that regulated industries in particular depend on.

For organizations in the Benelux already running Pega, or evaluating it, this Gartner recognition is a useful reference point in an internal business case: BOAT is no longer a niche analyst term, it’s a validated market direction, and Pega sits among its leaders.

 

What this means in practice

If your organization is still running automation as a patchwork of RPA bots, disconnected low-code apps, and a separate integration layer, the BOAT framework gives you language to describe the problem to stakeholders — and a credible roadmap toward the solution. The practical questions worth asking internally are:

• Where are our automation, case management, and integration efforts currently fragmented across tools that don’t share context?
• Do we have a governed way to introduce AI agents into existing processes, or are we bolting them on separately?
• Is our current platform — or the one we’re evaluating — built to orchestrate end-to-end outcomes, or does it automate isolated tasks?

 

How BPM Company can help

As a boutique Pega implementation partner in the Benelux, BPM Company works exclusively with the Pega platform — advisory, implementation, and training — for organizations looking to modernize legacy systems, streamline case management, and introduce AI-driven decisioning in a controlled, auditable way.

Curious about what a BOAT platform could mean for your organization? We’d be happy to explore the possibilities with you.