If you missed the webinar, you can find the recording here.
Most AI agents are built around a narrow tooling model: call a synchronous service, get a response, repeat. BAW Agent Factory breaks that model open by enabling agents native to IBM Business Automation Workflow. In this session, Salient and IBM will show how a tool can be a process, a service flow, a human task or service, an MCP tool, or even a branch of arbitrary complexity within a BAW application. That gives architects much more flexibility to combine agentic planning with deterministic execution in both synchronous and asynchronous scenarios. We'll examine how agents can run in processes, services, and conversational user experiences, and how agentic and deterministic behaviors can be composed hierarchically for more advanced solutions. BAW customers will see how to adopt agentic AI while continuing to leverage their existing platform investment, governance model, integrations, and operational strengths.
Speakers:
BRIAN FRENCH CEO and Founder, Salient Process
Brian French is the CEO and founder of Salient Process, IBM's top partner in Business Automation. He has spent more than 20 years focused on getting businesses to align process outcomes with organizational goals. His career began as a BPMS Architect at Intel, continued at Lombardi Software as a BPM Consultant, and extended to IBM when it acquired Lombardi in 2010. He founded Salient Process in 2011. In 2016, IBM acquired the SPARK UI Toolkit from Salient, which became the default UI for IBM Business Automation Workflow. Under his leadership, Salient has delivered more than 600 automation projects across financial services, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail. The firm earned the 2025 IBM AI for Business Award for North America. His current focus is the strategic case for agentic AI grounded in the platforms, governance, and skills enterprises already have.
ERIC DUCOS CTO and Principal Architect, Salient Process
Eric is a technology innovator, architect, and researcher whose work spans business automation, process execution, generative AI-driven digital agents, systems integration, information security, discrete event simulation, no-code solution generation, and digital work delivery. Over the course of his career, he has created, designed, and co-implemented numerous frameworks, engines, libraries, and methodologies used by large enterprises across industries, including Fortune 10 through Fortune 500 organizations.
He is the planner, architect, designer, and co-developer of BAW Agent Factory, an agentic framework built natively for IBM Business Automation Workflow that enables organizations to combine AI-driven planning with deterministic workflow execution. His recent work has focused on expanding how enterprises use agentic AI within established automation platforms, including support for agent tools based on processes, service flows, human tasks, and conversational user experiences. Eric is also the author of multiple technical publications and a mentor with a career built on enterprise automation and optimization.
Swapnil Agrawal
Swapnil Agrawal is the Senior Product Manager for Business Automation Workflow at IBM and is responsible for the roadmap and strategy of the product.
Bibin Baby
Bibin Baby is an Outbound Product Manager for IBM Business Automation Workflow. His role involves driving high-quality products to market through well-defined strategies and execution plans while continuously innovating to achieve market leadership. It’s about fostering genuine connections with clients, understanding their needs, and actively collaborating with cross-functional teams—ensuring that the narrative about our brand reflects a commitment to excellence and client satisfaction.