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The Integration Decision Behind AI-Ready SaaS Platforms

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Takeaways from WOW 2026 Embedded sessions: What ClickUp, ORO Labs, and CYPHER Learning built first, and what it made possible for AI.

Haillie Parker

Oct 13, 2026

Three SaaS platform leaders made the same integration decision early on: treat connectivity as part of the platform architecture, not a feature to rebuild for each customer. Today, that’s the layer they’re building AI on top of.

At World of Workato (WOW) 2026, the annual user conference for enterprise orchestration and AI, Workato Embedded customers took the stage to explain how they got there in the session From Embed to AI: The Architecture Decision That Changes Everything, moderated by Matthew Pflughoeft, Embedded Sales Manager at Workato.

On stage were:

Joelle Johnson, Lead Integrations Engineer at CYPHER Learning
Jason Foley, Director of Integration Services at ClickUp
Shashidhar Kamath, Director of Engineering at ORO Labs

Here’s what led each team to that call, and where AI fits now.

Why not keep integrations in-house?

The trigger was different at each company.

At CYPHER Learning, it was demand. Customers couldn’t use CYPHER without a Salesforce integration, and the company was losing money over it. Reuse mattered too – while each customer’s system was configured differently the use cases were very similar. The company ultimately chose Workato because non-technical users could build on it alongside engineers. Plus, it was reliable, the team loved its UI, and the price was right.

At ORO Labs, it was a build-or-buy call. Procurement touches a long list of enterprise applications. “We had to make a call whether our engineers spend our time building integrations into all of these applications, or we go with,” Shashidhar explained. “[We needed] a platform that was flexible, mature, and actually had built-in integrations.“

At ClickUp, Jason’s team compared several platforms and chose Workato for flexibility and scalability. Flexibility meant managing many customers in their own environments and writing complex logic, including JavaScript libraries, inside the recipe builder. “Initially, we were starting with some customers that were pretty small, and then we got into the Fortune 100 companies,” Jason shared. “We needed to scale from maybe a few thousand tasks to hundreds of millions of tasks in individual instances.”

What ClickUp, CYPHER, and ORO achieved with Workato

Standardizing the connectivity layer paid off in how fast – and affordably – each team could deliver.

ClickUp shipped its first integration to a paid customer 30 days after buying Workato. Repeatable templates then took an implementation that started at 60 to 80 hours down to about 10. That let Jason’s team build maintenance into customer contracts and run integrations as a profitable managed service, now with many hundreds of customers.

CYPHER got the same leverage from reuse. Joelle’s team built standard templates for the most common CRM and HRIS platforms. A change gets made once, in one place, instead of being repeated across every customer’s workspace.

“We were able to deliver integrations at speed, integrations that we trusted, integrations that our customers trusted. It was predictable.” — Joelle Johnson, CYPHER Learning

“We were able to deliver integrations at speed, integrations that we trusted, integrations that our customers trusted. It was predictable.” — Joelle Johnson, CYPHER Learning

At ORO, the biggest difference was how contained a change became. Shashidhar said that before orchestration, altering one thing meant touching every integration connected to it. Now policy changes happen in a single layer.

AI needs context, not just access

Faster delivery was the first result. The second came with AI, and that’s where the panel went deepest. Giving an agent access to your systems is one thing. Getting it to understand what it finds is harder.

Shashidhar used a procurement request to show the difference. An employee wants to know whether they can use a supplier, Acme, for a $300,000 consulting project. Answering that means checking the ERP, contracts, risk, and compliance, and the data is fragmented: there could be ten suppliers called Acme in the ERP and twenty accounts in the contracting system, none of them matching. Each system’s AI can read its own data, but even together they probably can’t answer the question.

ORO’s answer was a context layer that connects the records, the relationships between them, and the customer’s policies. AI uses that context to recommend a route, such as steering the request away from Acme toward a preferred supplier. Deterministic orchestration, with Workato’s integrations connecting each system, then carries it out inside the rules the customer’s IT team has set. For some ORO customers, a supplier extension that used to take days now takes 15 minutes.

“Deterministic orchestration doesn’t have to be predetermined. Our AI can say, ‘this is the best thing to do in this scenario.’ But then that deterministic orchestration underlying it can make sure these things happen according to the rules IT has set up for you.” — Shashidhar Kamath, ORO Labs

“Deterministic orchestration doesn’t have to be predetermined. Our AI can say, ‘this is the best thing to do in this scenario.’ But then that deterministic orchestration underlying it can make sure these things happen according to the rules IT has set up for you.” — Shashidhar Kamath, ORO Labs

Jason described a similar idea from the integration side. ClickUp made a bet about two years ago that context had to be in the system for the AI to be worth anything. With Workato pulling in Salesforce data and customer tickets, ClickUp’s AI can work across them, including through MCP servers. In one example, it compared accounts against tickets and recommended which customers to contact first.

Joelle’s example was role context. In Salesforce, a user (let’s say, Ashley) might look like any other user while another record lists her as someone’s manager. Because CYPHER’s standard Workato recipes connect those records, the AI knows to give her access to her direct reports’ enrollment and training information.

In all three cases, the AI does the reasoning, and Workato’s connectivity underneath gives it connected systems to work with.

Winning in the agentic era

Asked where their AI efforts go next, each panelist described less manual work, for their own teams and for their customers:

ClickUp wants to couple orchestration with its native offerings and bring in more data, so customers can stay in one place. Its mantra has been saving users a day a week, and Jason expects AI to save more.
At CYPHER, Joelle wants integrations that set themselves up with far less manual effort, so her engineers review what’s been assembled instead of building it.
ORO is aiming for a procurement team that spends its time on strategy, with the system carrying out their decisions.

“We were building an Iron Man suit with superpowers for the procurement department, through orchestration. Then along came AI. Now we can put Jarvis inside this Iron Man suit and automate a lot of this stuff. But not everything – we still have someone in the suit, overseeing things.” — Shashidhar Kamath, ORO Labs

“We were building an Iron Man suit with superpowers for the procurement department, through orchestration. Then along came AI. Now we can put Jarvis inside this Iron Man suit and automate a lot of this stuff. But not everything – we still have someone in the suit, overseeing things.” — Shashidhar Kamath, ORO Labs

Integrate, govern, and scale with Workato

What these three SaaS platforms share is the order they worked in. They built reusable, rule-driven connectivity underneath the product first, so AI has something dependable to run on.

Integration and orchestration are how your product executes. Governance is how you stay in control of what it does. Your AI needs both underneath it.

Workato ONE for SaaS Platforms gives product teams one place to build integrations, orchestration, and agent connectivity once and reuse them across every customer, with identity and audit built in.

Become the platform your customers can’t live without with Workato ONE for SaaS platforms.