Pegasystems’ Alan Trefler Shows a Path for Legacy Companies to Adopt AI

Agentic AI continues to transform modern business, which leaves legacy companies to face a critical question: evolve or be left behind. Few understand this crossroads better than Alan Trefler, founder and CEO of Pegasystems, who joined Bloomberg’s Tech Disruptors podcast to share how established enterprises can thrive in an AI-first world.

Pegasystems, founded in 1983, has survived and adapted through six generations of technology shifts. Trefler describes its evolution as deliberate. “From our inception, we aimed to create a better way for business teams... and IT teams... to operate more effectively in large businesses,” he said. Now, with AI driving the sixth wave of innovation, Pega has integrated what it calls “predictable AI” directly into its workflow and decisioning platform.

AI Without the Chaos

Trefler is quick to distinguish Pega’s approach to AI from the rest of the industry, especially in how it avoids the pitfalls of unpredictable generative AI reasoning at runtime. “We want to use the reasoning of these latest, most sophisticated models at design time,” he explained. “Once it defines the workflows, somebody can look at it, an auditor can approve it... Those workflows are defined at design time.”

This predictability, Trefler argues, is especially crucial for regulated industries like banking, insurance, and government, Pega’s primary clientele. “You can build a slew of workflows really easily that will always execute precisely,” he said. That’s a far cry from competitors that rely on language models to reason and make decisions on the fly, a practice Trefler calls “a horrible, horrible way to do it.”