Note: This research brief is part of theCUBE Research coverage of the AI Agent Builder Summit
At the AI Agent Builder Summit, hosted by theCUBE Research in the spring of 2025, Sema4.ai showcased not only an agentic AI platform but also a comprehensive agenda for enterprise-scale digital labor. Represented by its senior leadership—CEO Rob Bearden, Co-founder and CTO Ram Venkatesh, VP of Product Tommi Holmgren, Co-founder and SVP Paul Codding—and one of their clients, Emerson, Sema4.ai articulated a pragmatic, deeply engineered, and user-centric approach to deploying AI agents in real-world business environments.
Sema4.ai is a relatively new vendor in the enterprise software marketplace. They launched their business in 2024 with a bold goal: to bridge the “automation gap” by developing AI agents that not only analyze but also reason, act, and deeply integrate into enterprise workflows. Cofounded by experienced leaders from Cloudera, Docker, JBoss, and former open-source pioneer Robocorp, the company secured $55.5 million in a Series A funding in the first half of 2025. Since launching, Sema4.ai has established an impressive client base, including companies such as Emerson and Koch. These advancements highlight a strong and compelling product-to-market fit.
At the heart of Sema4.ai’s philosophy is a foundational commitment to building trustworthy AI agents. Trust is not treated as a feature but as the prerequisite for value creation in the enterprise. Trust isn’t an aspiration; it’s engineered. CEO Rob Bearden has emphasized that trust is the currency of innovation, and without it, AI agents cannot scale beyond the realm of experimentation.
“If an AI agent isn’t secure and explainable, it can’t be trusted—and if it can’t be trusted, it won’t deliver ROI. That’s why everything we do at Sema4.ai starts with trust. It’s the cornerstone of enterprise adoption and built directly into the architecture of every agent we deploy.”
Due to its rapid growth, high-profile investors, focus on establishing trustworthy AI, and innovative integration with Snowflake’s ecosystem, theCUBE Research believes Sema4.ai has earned a seat at the front of the table. We believe their strong emphasis on delivering production-ready, no-code AI agents—backed by solid revenue, strategic partnerships, and governance-first architecture—makes them one of the most compelling companies driving the next wave of enterprise AI adoption.
This brief will highlight the core differentiators we learned from Sema4.ai’s participation in the AI Agent Builder Summit, each of which supports our conclusion here at theCUBE Research that Sema4.ai has emerged as a category innovator in the enterprise agentic AI marketplace.
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An Enterprise Digital Labor Mindset
Sema4.ai is more than just a tools or platform company; it’s a solution designed for a future where human workers and intelligent agents collaborate side by side. Their model is based on the idea that enterprise AI adoption should evolve from task automation to goal-driven, multi-agent collaboration that reflects real-world organizational dynamics and desired outcomes, in changing environments.
This mindset is crucial when understanding where the money is spent within an enterprise. While IT typically accounts for 2–5% of revenue, labor costs comprise a substantial 60% or more of total expenses. This suggests that the greatest return on investment from AI won’t come solely from optimizing IT, but from augmenting human efforts with intelligent digital labor. Agentic AI allows businesses to create a complementary digital workforce: AI agents that can reason, plan, act, and collaborate across complex, cross-functional workflows.
It’s also important to recognize that automating tasks in isolation has limitations. In real-world enterprise settings, most work involves multiple departments such as finance, HR, operations, and others. Recent findings from Deloitte emphasize the urgent need for companies to adopt a digital labor model that fosters cross-organizational collaboration. Their research indicates that while 72% of business leaders recognize the value of boundaryless human-AI workflows, only 41% are taking proactive steps, and just 11% are achieving success. Those leading the way are already experiencing tangible results: organizations that effectively enable digital worker collaboration across departments are 1.6 times more likely to achieve business goals and 1.7 times more likely to realize positive human outcomes. As Deloitte noted at the AI Agent Builder Summit,
“CAIOs will become the HR department for digital workers.”
This is a recognition that agentic AI is more than just a tech trend; it’s a critical workforce transformation. For AI agents to generate enterprise-wide ROI, they must operate across traditional boundaries and connect seamlessly with both human colleagues and organizational systems.
As Paul Ferguson of Emerson remarked,
“We’re finally able to look at end-to-end automation and transformation, where humans and AI Agents collaborate to get things done across the enterprise.”
Furthermore, macroeconomic factors support this shift: labor markets are tight, with skilled roles becoming increasingly difficult to fill, while demographic trends restrict human workforce growth. Deploying AI as a digital partner enables businesses not only to save on labor costs but also to boost human potential, enhancing productivity, reducing errors, and scaling operations without adding more staff.
This is why Sema4.ai’s platform is horizontally designed, enabling orchestrated workflows across departments and systems. Their approach supports both vertical specificity and horizontal scalability, which are essential for agentic systems that must operate across a business, rather than in silos.
CEO Rob Bearden summarized the stakes:
“Enterprise agents are going to be the next generation of applications. They can perform very complex work… at levels of accuracy and predictability that drive returns in a way SaaS and analytics couldn’t without massive human involvement.”
The result? A workforce model where AI agents enhance human abilities, handle routine tasks, and support collaboration across departments. This team-based digital labor approach isn’t just a luxury; it’s essential for driving enterprise-wide digital labor transformation. theCUBE Research fully agrees with Sema4.ai’s philosophical view that it’s about cultural human resource transformation, not just technology-driven productivity.
Pioneering Trusted, SAFE AI Agents
At the heart of Sema4.ai’s architecture is its SAFE framework (Secure, Accurate, Fast, Extensible), designed to ensure that AI agents consistently earn the trust of users, decision-makers, and IT. This emphasis on trust isn’t just theoretical; it’s cultural and essential for business. A recent PwC survey of U.S. executives found that the vast majority expressed a lack of trust in the outcomes produced by digital co-workers (AI agents). However, agents with robust, built-in safeguards and explainable results inspired more confidence: 64% trusted them to make low-risk decisions without human oversight.
In this context, Sema4.ai’s SAFE framework is a vital part of their enterprise AI Agent platform, outlining their agent design philosophy and addressing the enterprise’s need for trustworthy AI. Unlike traditional automation, Sema4.ai‘s agents are not just fast or intelligent—they are built to be governable and auditable from the start. The SAFE framework integrates:
- Secure and governed: In the Wild West of AI, security and governance are your six-shooters. You need agents that operate within your established rules, not rogue bots going off-script. This means agents that authenticate and operate securely on behalf of users. Sema4.ai agents also run safely inside your VPC.
- Accurate and explainable: No one wants an agent that’s fast but wrong, or precise but slower than molasses in January. Sema4.ai agents access data securely using audited and tested queries to ensure accuracy. While producing accurate outcomes is important, you also need to show your work or you’ll still fail the class. Businesses need to understand why their agents are doing what they’re doing. Explainability builds trust and prevents catastrophic errors.
- Fast and easy: Time is money. You need agents that can be built and deployed quickly and managed without a PhD in computer science. “Fast and easy” isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.
- Extensible and adaptable: Imagine your business apps and data sources are all separate islands. Sema4.ai agents build instant, high-speed bridges between them, making everything feel like one big, connected mainland. Their agents are like versatile Swiss Army knives for your apps and data—they can connect to anything you have and are flexible enough to handle whatever your business throws their way as it evolves.
Together, these principles establish a control-focused architecture designed for mission-critical workflows and act not just as a technical framework but also as a facilitator for cultural adoption.
Of these, in theCUBE Research’s opinion, explainable outcomes are the most important for building trust in AI agents, especially in enterprise environments where decisions must be auditable, repeatable, and aligned with policy. Without transparency into how an agent reaches its conclusions, users will be hesitant to rely on it for mission-critical workflows. Sema4.ai stands out among agentic AI platform providers. Through its Workroom interface, users can inspect the reasoning paths, data inputs, and execution logic behind every agent decision. As CTO Ram Venkatesh notes,
“Our agents aren’t improvising plans on the fly—they’re following trusted, transparent workflows that make their logic easy to verify.”
This commitment to explainability not only builds trust but also speeds up enterprise adoption by providing stakeholders with the visibility and control they need to confidently scale AI.
Finally, real-world outcomes validate the approach: with SAFE agents, Emerson improved remittance-matching accuracy from 30% to over 80%, automatically freeing knowledge workers for higher-value tasks. As Paul Ferguson at Emerson noted at the AI Agent Builder Summit:
“Since deploying Sema4.ai agents, we’ve not only seen a major automation uplift—matching over 80% of remittances—but also gained confidence through transparent, auditable processes that make trust not just assumed, but built-in.”
By embedding trust into security, accuracy, responsiveness, and explainability, Sema4.ai aims to differentiate itself around the “trust dimension”, which TheCUBE Research heartily applauds. After all, without trust, the promise of agentic AI isn’t possible. Simply put, no trust, no ROI. Rob Bearden encapsulates the importance of this mindset:
“If an AI agent isn’t secure and explainable, it can’t be trusted—and if it can’t be trusted, it won’t deliver ROI. That’s why everything we do at Sema4.ai starts with trust.”
With Sema4.ai‘s SAFE capabilities, especially when combined with the Rackspace Foundry for AI (FAIR) through a recent collaboration, enterprise clients can establish a foundation for trusted agentic capabilities and operational AI excellence. This aims to speed up the transition from proof of concept to scalable, secure AI agent deployments.
Empowering Business Users
Sema4.ai is redefining who gets to build the future of work. By enabling business users, not just developers, to create and adapt AI agents, the company is unlocking the full potential of agentic AI as a digital labor platform.
This capability offers a suite of tools that enable domain experts to transform ideas into operational agents within hours, using natural language “runbooks” along with their AI-powered assistant, Sai. As Tommi Holmgren explained,
“Building agents with AI just makes sense. With Sai, I can describe an agent in plain English and have it running it in minutes. It’s like Google for building enterprise agents.”
Sai, which stands for Sema4 Agent Intelligence, is an embedded AI assistant within their agent studio explicitly designed to empower business analysts and tech-savvy users (as well as other non-developers) to quickly build powerful, enterprise-grade AI agents that typically require coding skills. Its objective in life is to democratize agent creation across the enterprise, within a governed framework. By allowing business analysts and domain experts to describe agent behavior in natural language, Sai shifts the responsibility of innovation from developers to those who best understand the business process and desired outcomes.
Within the Sema4.ai Studio interface, users can describe a task or objective, upload standard operating procedures, and Sai will synthesize a complete runbook, identify necessary actions from its gallery, and configure integrations to enterprise systems. The result is a fully operational AI agent ready for deployment in minutes. This radically shortens time-to-value, reduces dependence on IT, and empowers functional teams to adapt digital coworkers to real-world needs as those needs evolve. Sai guides users through:
- Intent discovery: via natural language, interactive dialog.
- Automated runbook building: comprehensive workflow definitions.
- Action selection and code generation: enabling seamless app integration.
- One-click deployment: simplifying deployment into production environments.
The runbooks, which are essentially structured guides outlining what the agent should do, become living blueprints that are intuitive enough for non-developers to maintain, yet organized enough to ensure predictable execution and governance. This empowers line-of-business professionals to adapt and make adjustments to changing conditions without needing help from IT or writing code. Ram Venkatesh emphasized the impact:
“The runbook is the part businesses want to change the most. We make that as simple and transparent as possible.”
As Paul Ferguson from Emerson pointed out, this capability isn’t just for initial deployments, but is designed for scale.
“Being able to describe a process narrative and combine it with actions across multiple apps in one runbook—that’s really powerful.”
This “middle-ground” capability, between low-code and developer-driven frameworks, uniquely positions Sema4.ai to enable a broader population of employees to build, maintain, and govern AI agents using a guided, no-code experience.
For enterprise leaders, Sai can become the catalyst that transforms agentic AI from a technical capability into a practical digital co-worker, available to anyone, governed by design.
But Sema4.ai’s commitment to democratization doesn’t come at the expense of control. Their Control Room, the governance and compliance nerve center, ensures that every agent, regardless of who builds it, adheres to enterprise-grade standards. This enables organizations to empower end-users while maintaining visibility, accountability, and compliance.
The Control Room essentially operates as a centralized platform for the lifecycle management of enterprise agents. That is, a business operations layer designed to bring visibility, auditability, and governance to digital workers throughout the enterprise. It enables:
- Workspace-level separation for departmental use cases
- Secure API credential management.
- Deployment versioning, rollback, and lifecycle controls.
- Segmentation of agents into dev, staging, and production environments.
- Support for traceable, auditable, and explainable accounting.
As agents are created in the Studio, they are published to the Control Room and operated through the Workroom interface. Each step is designed to clearly separate roles and responsibilities between technical and business users. For IT and compliance teams, this division offers the control and observability necessary to transition from pilot projects to full production. It also enables agents to assume the identity and credentials of end-users as dictated by policies, interfacing securely with third-party systems and other digital collaborators, while maintaining audit trails intact.
This unified model, what theCUBE Research calls “trusted autonomy,” is essential for enterprise-scale digital labor. The AI agents of the future won’t just be digital tools; they’ll be digital coworkers. It only makes sense that the people working alongside them should help define their behavior, adapt to evolving business needs, and ensure they operate with transparency and traceability.
We believe Sema4.ai has cracked this code. By uniting no-code creation, AI-assisted agent building, and robust governance in a single architecture, they transform agentic AI from a technology experiment into a business transformation platform. It’s not just empowering business users, it positions them at the center of AI’s next frontier.
What To Expect Next
Sema4.ai is not just building software; it’s laying the foundation for a new labor model where digital agents work alongside humans as trusted co-workers. The company has clarified that the next chapter of enterprise AI is not just about workflow automation; it’s about developing the digital labor marketplace and fostering a cultural shift in how organizations operate. In this future, enterprise work is fundamentally changed by digital co-workers that assist human workers in planning, decision-making, and problem-solving, seamlessly turning insights into action at unmatched speed.
Our view is that four strategic pillars anchor their roadmap:
- Strategic data ecosystem expansion
- Expanded decision intelligence
- New AI + human collaboration models
- Cultural transformation best practices
Sema4.ai has already demonstrated its dedication to building a strategic ecosystem of customers and business partners. We expect them to expand their co-creation partnerships, such as with Koch Industries and Emerson, as well as their ISV platform strategy, including strengthening integrations with Snowflake, and possibly adding new partners, like the recent announcement of a new prebuilt AI agent marketplace in collaboration with Rackspace.
As an example of how the ecosystem strategy improves client value, see the June 2025 launch of Team Edition on the Snowflake Marketplace. This now allows customers to deploy AI agents directly within Snowflake’s environment using Snowpark Container Services and Cortex AI. This “zero-copy” model brings AI to your data, improving agent security and governance by removing the need to transfer sensitive enterprise data. Additionally, the recent launch of the Enterprise Edition reinforces their SAFE promise by enhancing document intelligence, knowledge-base retrieval, and contextual understanding through Snowflake’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which enables agents to connect to any enterprise application contextually. These moves also signal their ambition to become the horizontal foundation for enterprise agentic workflows.
Sema4.ai aims to build upon these capabilities to expand its reasoning abilities, with roadmap investments focused on decision intelligence frameworks that go beyond simple task automation. Their agents will become more capable of contextualizing information, resolving ambiguity, and adjusting decisions based on changing conditions, which is essential for real-world enterprise applications. As Paul Codding explained:
“We’re focused on helping customers move from insight to action—not just by extracting information, but by making intelligent, explainable decisions on their behalf.”
Recognizing that most enterprise work is cross-functional, Sema4.ai is also investing in enabling multi-agent orchestration across departments and fostering new AI-human collaboration models. Their architecture will increasingly support collaborative agent-based workflows where multiple agents and humans participate in complex, interdependent processes. Expect improved support for cross-enterprise reasoning, sharing of business logic, and reusable runbooks to accelerate scaling for multiple use cases. This is a clear example of why we believe Sema4.ai is focusing not just on providing an AI Agent platform but also on creating a genuine digital labor platform that requires these capabilities.
Perhaps most importantly, Sema4.ai recognizes that agentic AI is not just a technological change; it signifies a potentially unprecedented cultural shift. To support this, they are investing in helping customers manage their cultural transformations through education, onboarding programs, and governance tools to assist clients in transitioning from software projects to digital labor strategies. As Tommi Holmgren noted at the summit:
“You’re not just deploying software—you’re hiring digital co-workers. That changes how people work, how they think, and how they collaborate.”
Our Conclusion
Sema4.ai appears to be on a compelling trajectory, fueled by nearly $60 million in investment, which highlights why theCUBE Research believes enterprises should pay close attention to Sema4.ai: they practice what they preach, demonstrating a steadfast focus on innovation, trust, interoperability, and executing at scale.
In our view, what sets them apart is their dedication to promoting TRUST and the broader business impact of DIGITAL LABOR. Their focus is rooted in enabling a co-creation model with business users while maintaining governance, architectural integrity, and cross-enterprise collaboration. The future of digital labor will demand this exact combination of empowerment and accountability, and Sema4.ai is helping to shape that vision.
The foundation they are building today will shape the agentic AI operating systems of the future. Sema4.ai is not selling a point solution or a narrow automation tool. It is delivering a platform—and more importantly, a methodology—for responsibly adopting AI agents at scale.
Savannah Peterson, a principal analyst at theCUBE Research, netted it out well:
“I also really appreciate that they’re focused on the human being behind the digital workforce, and I think that’s a big differentiator… It sounds like there is a very consistent feedback loop and empathy in the design of the digital workforce that they’re offering.”
Which Scott Hebner, principal analyst for AI at theCUBE Research, endorsed:
“What Sema4.ai is doing isn’t just a technology play—it’s a cultural transformation. They’re enabling business users to build and adapt AI agents using natural language, in a safe, trusted environment. That’s how digital coworkers become a reality—and that’s why we believe they’re a company to watch.”
Enterprise leaders evaluating agentic AI should see Sema4.ai not just as a vendor, but as a strategic partner capable of supporting both immediate value and long-term platform growth. With a thorough understanding of enterprise realities and a strong focus on trust, they offer one of the most comprehensive and compelling approaches in the market today. For these reasons, any enterprise aiming to move beyond AI hype and toward measurable, auditable results should pay close attention to Sema4.ai.
To learn more about Sema4.ai and how your organization can benefit from their platform:
- Watch the AI Agent Builder Pre-Summit Session
- Watch the CEO and Emerson Session
- Watch the Enterprise AI Agent Platform Session
- Watch the Team Edition on Snowflake Session
You can also visit the Sema4.ai portal on the AI Builder Summit Portal to access session video clips, transcripts, and resource materials.
This analyst brief is part of theCUBE Research coverage of the AI Agent Builder Summit.
Graphics sourced from the Sema4.ai website and theCUBE Research.
