We sat down with KPMG CIO, Craig Wishart, to discuss his company’s integration journey with MuleSoft and how it’s laying the groundwork for the next generation of AI.
Interview with Craig Wishart, KPMG’s CIO
MuleSoft: KPMG has been a MuleSoft customer for nearly two years. What was the core business challenge or opportunity that drove that decision?
Craig Wishart: Like a lot of organizations, designing, building and operationalizing interconnected systems and applications is an important consideration. Integrating platform services and business processes challenges many technology and business leaders. The business decision for leveraging MuleSoft was based on reducing the time and cost to modernize our technology footprint; ensuring we could easily and securely access our data to solve business problems; and accelerating further integration opportunities across the enterprise.
MuleSoft: How did you build the business and investment case to support this?
Craig: Our primary focus was solving business problems and accelerating growth, strengthening client relationships, and demonstrating cost-to-value.
The team remained focused on the why, how, and what when building the case for the technology investment. Organizational strategy alignment becomes important at this point. Aligning [with our] business stakeholders is critical for achieving buy-in.
The business case for MuleSoft wasn’t a technology business case, it was part of a strategy to build a truly connected organization by aligning user experience, seamless systems, and security. Fundamentally, we identified a requirement for a platform which will deliver an integrated backbone, securely connecting our enterprise systems, applications and data services. Those requirements coincidently, are also foundational requirements for being able to execute agentic AI initiatives.
MuleSoft: What frameworks do you suggest for other CIOs/tech leaders in this position?
Craig: I’d refer them to SSSPTP as a priority framework for building the business case, an ordered approach to technology and business that covers:
- Strategy
- Services
- Structure
- partners
- Technology
- People
Hypothesis formations are very important. “Why do we believe using MuleSoft should be considered?” for instance. From here, there are three critical questions to always consider when a statement is made or a hypothesis is formed:
- What do you mean by that? Eg What do we mean by value; what do we mean by “integrated”?
- What evidence do you have for the claim? How did you come to that conclusion? How do we use evidence/numbers to prove our hypotheses and assumptions. How will we prove the business case held
- What else was considered? What other options are there? Ie what other solutions/approaches did we consider, and importantly, why did we rule them out
MuleSoft: Where does MuleSoft fit within KPMG’s agentic AI strategy?
Craig: MuleSoft acts as our integration backbone and reusable API layer that connects AI with enterprise systems safely, efficiently, and at scale. The platform allows for a robust library of reusable APIs simplifying our technology business process services.
Anypoint Platform allows us to standardize APIs from across our business, making them easy for AI agents to consume. Our decision to go with MuleSoft has been further validated by the new capabilities launched including Agent Fabric that will simplify how we govern, orchestrate and monitor agents across our business. We have a number of strategic technology vendors and we are leveraging different agentic capabilities from each. Being able to apply governance and security over different agents from a single plane of glass will further accelerate our efforts in this space.
We are keenly watching the rise of autonomous integration agents. AI systems that don’t just consume APIs but dynamically orchestrate them, monitor outcomes, and adapt their behavior based on real-time feedback.
MuleSoft: How do you articulate the value integration and an API layer delivers back to the business?
Craig: Every organization is fundamentally a technology organization. Many years ago, a banking executive told me: “We’re a technology organization masquerading as a bank.” There is truth in that statement. Reliance on technology services, interconnected architecture and service performance is ever increasing, cost-to-value (technology business management) and expectations of service quality is unrelenting.
Trust is like the air you breathe. You don’t often think about it but you sure know when it’s not there. As a tech executive, your executive presence is built on trust of the services you deliver.
Every quarter we report back to the business on the APIs we’ve built in MuleSoft and their rate of reuse as well as the business initiatives those APIs have delivered. This serves as a constant reminder of the value we are generating from the platform and the value that integration and an API layer have to our business.
