Generative AI And Data Integration: The Transformative Shift in iPaaS for Government

Just when the federal government is starting to embrace Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), a seismic shift is fully upon us in the form of Generative AI.

As a platform that connects disjointed systems and solutions into one unified solution, iPaaS enables this by bringing together multiple applications and their data by applying business rules and logic to link everything together.

iPaaS allows government agencies to deliver a stronger application portfolio to end users, whether they are staff, citizens or constituents in general. As highlighted in this StateTech article, iPaaS provides every user a better government experience, and agencies can operate on “Internet time” rather than “government time.”

It also provides the ability to access data consistently across systems and more complete data overall. This enhances critical decision-making by accessing and interpreting deep pools of automated data available in many government systems, while also minimizing any potential misinterpretation of the data. Finally, it simplifies and speeds up workflows with little IT development time.

With 2023 clearly being the year of Artificial Intelligence (AI) potentially transforming virtually everything, iPaaS is also poised for a dramatic shift in this new landscape.

The Emerging iPaaS Landscape Driven by Generative AI

With an uncanny ability to process natural language inputs and responses, Generative AI will transform integration platforms for government and simplify today’s complexities. Here’s how:

• On-Demand Integrations: The user interface between a government employee and an iPaaS may be as easy as asking a simple request, as one does now with ChatGPT.
• Integration Connectors that Practically Build Themselves: A limitless number of integration connectors could be built – and maintained – by simply asking your iPaaS. The “library” could be as infinitely vast as the number of applications and systems that exist to connect.
• Better, Smarter, Self-Healing Data Mapping: AI will constantly monitor for data mapping errors, understand the problem and proactively plug the leaks. It means no data downtime, and insights you can trust – all without human intervention.

With the rise of Generative AI, we will be seeing more conversational interfaces developed that make it as simple as just asking for a new integration. Previously, this required complex and brittle coding that could only be done by developers.

Modern iPaaS has a user-friendly interface for developers and citizen integrators. Generative AI enables you to transfer information from platform A to platform B without understanding the technical details. Just tell it what you want, like with ChatGPT.

When it comes to integration connectors, which are the building blocks of the iPaaS, Generative AI will remove the need for connectors to be built and managed by an iPaaS vendor or the community of users. It’s important to note that community-built connectors often don’t have exacting quality control, and are not always actively maintained. By simply asking your iPaaS, a virtually unlimited number of connectors could be built and maintained.

In addition, with data formats and standards rapidly changing, it can be challenging to ensure that an agency’s data is properly mapped in its integrations. When this happens, data quality loss happens, which can result in gleaning the wrong insights or compromising citizen and constituent experiences.

It will be possible for AI to constantly monitor for data mapping errors, understand the problem and proactively plug the leaks. This will result in no data downtime, and trusted insights without any need for human intervention.

AI-Driven Integrations Built for Government

Since its inception 40 years ago, Software AG has always been about connectivity, and it is exploring new AI-driven integrations that are truly built for government to life.

Starting on the commercial side, these new AI-driven integration solutions will be designed to make it easier for agencies to better meet emerging constituent, citizen and staff needs through this new iPaaS frontier.

This will be driven by our commercial webMethods AI, which is an autonomous integration platform that translates business operation requests into custom connections and workflows with no integration experience required.

Conclusion

This vision is to allow anyone to easily connect the agency systems they use every day – by simply asking. Custom integrations will be developed from scratch based on natural language inputs.

It will simplify the complex by understanding current API specs for any SaaS application integration, retrieve and match your custom field names, and help you schedule syncs. webMethods AI will also monitor the health of an agency’s data integrations and keep fixing the errors – or simply notify you in a natural language if an entry requires attention.

Finally, this emerging solution will free up an agency’s integration engineers to better use their time on more strategic and meaningful work to support the mission.

To learn more, click here to schedule a time to speak with a government-focused technology expert Software AG Government Solutions.