5 Questions: Bill Conner on Why Security is the Future of AI

By Amber Wolff, Content Manager

Bill Conner had originally planned to go into nuclear physics. But today he’s presiding over a company centered around a completely different type of fusion, charting a new course toward the confluence of AI, low-code and security.

On the latest episode of “The Difference Engine,” Conner traced his history from rural Arkansas to one of CRN’s 25 most influential executives, offering hosts Paul Maher and Jonathan Simnett a look at what’s coming next for AI and for Jitterbit.

Jonathan Simnett: So, here you find yourself yet again, recreating a company. Can you tell us a little about Jitterbit and its AI journey, and where you see the company evolving in the next 3-5 years?

Bill Conner: I’ve talked about the digital data journey, and how that led to infrastructure, web and mobile, the data IP stack and then security. And that’s been my journey, too. I was in security for 30 years, and based on my own history, security’s never going to go away. But every once in a while, you’ve got to look at what the next big wave will be.

Low-code has done an incredible job of making coding simpler and more democratic. There are fewer skills required to do it, but you still have to have skill, and this is an industry that is completely skill-restrained globally, everywhere. That’s the big promise of AI.

Just like we learned with the internet, it starts with the platform. As I saw what NVIDIA was doing in the chip space — breaking Moore’s Law, and the comp speed, energy, cost and performance, and doing it not just with hardware, but with an operating system — it reminded me of the early days of the internet and the mobile era.

I’ve been working with machine-learning for a while, which is kind of the father of AI. Machine-learning is learning from data and trying to build models, and that’s really what AI is — it’s just using voice processing, more power and more compute.

So, when I looked at that, I saw the confluence of security, AI and low-code coming together. It’s been interesting because 18 months ago, we started this journey yet again. One of my advisors at the University of Pisa, among others, asked me, “Bill, where are you going with this?” It took about six months, but here we are — and you can also see it in Informatica and Salesforce coming together. The promise of AI is here and growing in infrastructure first. Next will be applications and software, and agentic AI is all about that.

Paul Maher: So, we’re early on, right? I mean, we see the low-code and vibe-coding, and other stuff, offering some proven technologies, some not proven or yet to be proven. How would you map the next 3-5 years for companies that are storied and proven like Jitterbit?

Bill Conner: It’s real. Let’s start with that. But there’s this big debate: Do you jump on it? A lot of those who jumped early, if you look at what Gartner said last year, about 85% of those projects failed. And they failed because they were a silver bullet. They were a technology looking for a project, or a project looking for a technology, and not an opportunity to solve a business problem.

When I came to Jitterbit, I changed the focus to how we could evolve our products to combine AI, low-code and security, so you can travel your AI journey at your own pace. So now whether you’re a line-of-business user or IT, you’ve got a platform built on a foundation of security governance, scalability and trustworthiness, but on top you can use low-code or AI. And you don’t have to be a coder, and you don’t have to have all those resources.

IDC estimated that there are going to be 500 million web, mobile and system apps developed in the next two years. The average enterprise today has a thousand apps, and only 28% of them are integrated. Jitterbit is leading this new generation that can put all that together, from the applications to the integrations, to the exposures through APIM, all using AI and low-code. It’s transparent and evolves with you.

Jonathan Simnett: Building AI-infused technology is super hard, and I think the reason is that sometimes others may not yet see its relevance. You’ve got a development team, sales team, and customers to convince. How do you lead under these circumstances?

Bill Conner: You lead with it being part of the business, and the culture and the change. The whole framework that my CTO and I took when we came in was to evolve and revolutionize at the same time.

We have a low-code platform that does integrations, APIM, EDI and it builds mobile, web and system apps. What we decided to do was infuse AI into that low-code platform. That means that instead of just coding, we’re now giving you a UX that’s AI so you can use your voice, but there’s still coding behind it. So, now I’m applying UI and AI at the lowest level of data and use case, and that gives it more accountability and fewer hallucinations. No one in our space is doing that.

What it means for the user, though, is that now they can use low-code and AI interchangeably, and can go back and forth with just a click. For line-of-business users, what’s been most interesting about building applications with it is that you still need 90 days of training and probably 90 days to code an application. But AI reduces that by orders of magnitude. You used to build an app by working with someone in the business that knew what they were doing. You’d tell them what you want, they’d write it down, then they would sit down with coders to code it. It required people, resources, time and to be picked as priority against other initiatives. Now they don’t have to do all of that.

What we’ve found in our customer betas is that because you can build apps as a novice or an expert in our system, most of those people were truly experts. That’s why they were telling others what to code, and instead of telling the person, they’re just typing in a prompt or saying it in natural language to the AI, and it’s coding it for them. And now they can build a prototype, and it has all the security and privacy, it’s timestamped, and it’s digitally signed. It takes care of all the stuff that used to be a burden. So that’s the difference.

About a month and a half ago, we were in London announcing our agentic AI technology. What these agents already do for us, we’re now putting them on our marketplace to do for others. What’s cool about that is that it doesn’t change what they do today. It just changes how they do it. You can go at your own speed. If you want to go faster, lean in, but if you get stuck, you can just go back to what you were doing before.

So for the tech people, if you’re pondering AI, think of what AI is going to do for you. What do you want it to do for you? Think through that, because that’s what projects are valid. What business outcomes can it help you solve? Is it a resource issue, speed issue, money issue, process issue? That’s how we tend to apply it, and I think that’s true both at Jitterbit and with our customers and partners, and it’s also true for anyone that’s wanting to look at this technology.

Paul Maher: Where do you think AI is headed — not for the pioneers in these multi-billion play LLMs, but for the rest of us in the tech industry?

Bill Conner: The ones that are going to succeed are on the edge, pushing the frontier on tools and capabilities and embedding it into their current products. And I think 5 to 10 years from now we’ll be looking at a different life cycle.

We talked about Moore’s law earlier — when we built our first App Builder AI integration with low-code and introduced it in London, by the time we’d come back to London five or six months later, it had already been ripped out and replaced again. I’m used to pretty fast lifecycles in software, 12-24 months. But I’ll tell you, it’s a three-month operating cycle on some of these AI capabilities. We’re in the early piece of that innovation.

I think the next five years are going to be innovating heavily, and the people who embed those technologies, knowing it might be for a long time because the capabilities are changing. You’ve got to be built for that.

But I think that’s a value proposition too, because as I tell customers and partners, if you think your company is going to be able to keep up with the pace of AI technology, unless you’re a very big company, you can’t. You’re going to have to rely on your vendors to embed that and then you’ll add AI to your processes or tools to work with it. So businesses should be thinking in terms of layered AI. Not that they’re going to control the whole AI stack, because if you try to build it all the way, you’ll never get there.

We introduced layers to AI, with our agentic AI, infused AI, and then the third layer is what other AI you build onto it, whether you use Copilot or other things in your enterprise. The further AI gets away from the source data, the more hallucinations, because it’s got to make assumptions. By the time you get to agentic AI, it’s really effective and accountable, and you’re not worried about privacy and security because it’s nested, layered and linked.

If you just build AI at the top of that stack and think it’s going to go down and touch 30 different data silos, you’re going to have some wild hallucinations. Our approach builds off the 20 years of machine learning and data and the use cases we’ve built over time adding to that.

Paul Maher: Where are we with the AI hype? Is it too much? Obviously you’re in the AI game; how are you finding holding onto this rocket ship? Has it gotten a bit too hype-y for you?

Bill Conner: It’s way hyped for sure, but underneath all that smoke and hype is a real fire. As you and I talked when I started this journey, it’s real.

And as I’ve said when I came into this job, my next 20 years will be at the intersection of AI. It’s the next generational technology transition that’s going to reshape the world, just like mobile did, just like data and digital did, just like the internet did.

I was having a discussion with an ex-Federal Reserve individual who’s now at an investment bank, and he put it into perspective. If you look at all of our GDPs, they’re all down, right? The global economy is not in a good space. He said, if you look around, there are a lot of things you can’t control right now impacting businesses and governments. So they’re going to bet on what will get their costs down and businesses up. And that’s AI.

So while I think the hype is there, I think there’s a deep belief coming out of that hype, the real fire underneath that, the transforming infrastructure of AI. People are getting the lexicon. They’re starting to see how it can transform.