Pega's Working to Address AI Returns Realization

While everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, the concern among many businesses is getting value out of the investments, pointed out Pegasystems Chief Technology Officer Don Sherman in conjunction with the PegaWorld 2026 conference this week in Las Vegas.

"There is increasing concern in the marketplace about the amount of money that's being spent on AI and the actual value that it's returning," Sherman said. "People are realizing that if you're not careful, you can burn a lot of tokens and not make a meaningful difference in the efficiency of your business or the experiences."

Realizing returns is also a challenge, as are the use of the technology in regulated industries and across borders, he added.

The first step in managing those challenges, according to Sherman, is reimagining the way work is done with AI today.

To gain value and reach a return on investment, companies need to move past simply bolting on the technology to where they are reworking business processes so they can use AI as efficiently as possible, he added.

To support its assertion that successful implementation of agentic AI depends on rethinking processes throughout the organization, Pega unveiled the results of new research which found that the vast majority (96 percent) of those who successfully implemented agentic AI had rethought existing processes. The survey also found that more than half (53 percent) said they've done so to a significant extent, by reimagining everything their organizations do to gain maximum benefit from their agentic implementations. Eighty percent agreed business and IT were willing to embrace new technology, innovation, and ideas to explore new possibilities.

Other survey findings included the following:

• Nearly three quarters (71 percent) of successful agentic AI implementers said one of their top two pre-deployment objectives was to automate and simplify complex processes.
• Fifty-eight percent said their execution aligned with these objectives had already been rewarded with predictable outcomes, reduced complexity, and improved customer experiences.
• Ninety-five percent of those who successfully deployed AI agents have specific corporate-level strategies and plans for execution.
• Sixty-five percent have comprehensive, pre-agreed success metrics tied to business outcomes that are regularly reviewed, so implementation success is continually evaluated.

One of the solutions to help companies optimize their AI investments is Pega Blueprint AI, which the company introduced at the conference. Pega Blueprint AI will be integrated within Amazon Web Services (AWS) Transform to help organizations modernize mainframe applications faster and with minimal friction. This integration will enable clients to extract and analyze their legacy COBOL code with AWS Transform and reimagine it with Pega Blueprint AI into new cloud-ready agentic applications.

Among the benefits of Pega Blueprint AI are the following:

• Reimagining dated workflows: The new Pega Blueprint AI agent in AWS Transform takes COBOL code analysis and synthesizes it with the latest industry best practices and regulations to transform legacy mainframe processes into agile and reliable modern workflows.
• Accelerating time to value: Organizations can reimage the outdated processes holding them back with the help of Pega Blueprint AI, which is informed by industry best practices.

The Pega Customer Engagement Studio will take the best offerings from Blueprint, bringing together Pega and third-party agents so marketers can move from marketing brief to live personalized actions while maintaining governance and control.

Pega also used the conference to announce that customers can now design, build, and run their agentic workflows across Pega Infinity without paying per token. The Pega Predictable AI architecture will shift the heavy AI reasoning to design time, so runtime agents are fast, reliable, and dramatically cheaper to run, the company said, noting that avoiding per-token costs directly addresses two of the most pressing obstacles for companies trying to scale AI agents: escalating token costs and unreliable outcomes.

"Token bills are arriving, and they are shocking enterprise leaders," Pega officials said in a statement. "LLM providers are converting flat-rate subscriptions to more expensive token-metered pricing while quietly running up expensive reasoning tokens behind the scenes. The more complex the request, the more reasoning steps are required and the more likely it generates an inadequate and inconsistent answer."

Pega also hinted at the release of Pega Infiniti 26 later this year. Karim Akgonul, chief product officer at the company, called it "the most ambitious product release in over a decade."