How Vodafone, Rabobank and others are driving meaningful results with AI – Interview with Matt Healy of Pega

November 6, 2025

Today’s episode of the Punk CX podcast features a chat that I recently had with Matt Healy, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pega, where we talk about legacy transformation, how big some of the legacy challenges facing firms are, how Pega is responding, why it’s important for organisations to have a real strategy with respect to AI agents in order to get meaningful results rather than just applying a bunch of agents and hoping for the best and some lessons from the most successful companies who are managing to scale their AI projects, generate meaningful commercial returns and drive improvements in customer-related outcomes.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Equip people with AI to enable them to lead with emotional intelligence – Interview with Miranda Collard of TP – and is number 561 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Matt:

Matt: People have been calling me the Sid Vicious of AI for, I don’t know, for minutes, at least.
The presence of legacy debt doesn’t get a lot of airtime in mainstream media forums.
But, if you talk to anyone at a large enterprise who’s working either with or within the IT department, they know that they have hundreds, maybe thousands of systems, which they need to get off of. They’re just non-strategic. And, they’re dragged down as a result of these.
We recently did a study that found, on average, large enterprises are spending $370 million per year on legacy debt.
There’s a multitude of hidden costs with legacy debt that impact your efficiency, your customer experience, or your employee experience.
However, legacy technology is not necessarily bad.
Around 70 % of Fortune 500 organisations still use the mainframe, and for certain workflows and use cases, that’s fine because they work, and they may be in areas where they don’t need to drive as much innovation.
But, there are still tons of workloads which would benefit from unlocking that data to drive new levels of automation, from exposing them to customers for more self-service use cases, from improving the employee experience and giving people better platforms to work within.
You’ve got to take a look at your inventory as an enterprise, figure out what your overall strategy is, what your principles are for driving those transformations and then take it from there.
We had Vodafone at Pegaworld talk about how they’re using Blueprint to deploy new workflows to automate their network operations in 40 hours. From idea to a new automation in under a week. That is unheard of.
Another enterprise, an insurer, that was trying to get off of Lotus Notes, which they use for their complaints workflow, and to do that we recorded 30 minutes of them actually using the application in the ways that they would, walking through and narrating the steps they would take and why. We then built an AI agent which could take both the transcript, the screenshots and the video and it extracts the user journey, the user flow, the data elements, and then any user requirements as well to build out the framework for your application in Blueprint.
In a regulated industry you can’t deal with hallucinations, you can’t deal with variability, things have to be done the same way every single time, following your rules, following your standards and driving repeatability and auditability across the board.
It’s really about, you know, defining structured processes, structured rules in the ways that business people approach them today, and then having the AI pull from that in terms of its behaviour and be governed by those frameworks.
There’s IP in the process. So, breaking it down and having it be controllable, auditable, governable, and all these different aspects is starting from how you want to do business, rather than having something else dictate how you want to do business.
I think the reason behind this whole 95 % of AI agents aren’t realising return on investment is that these pilots that enterprises are taking on were never set up to realise return on investment.
A lot of the AI projects that are out there they’re like simple chatbots on top of data sets that already existed. So instead of looking something up, you can ask an AI agent to go look it up for you. That’s cool. That’s a good marginal benefit. It’s going to save employees a couple of minutes here and there. But there’s no opportunity to scale that into something that’s actually transformational.
The enterprises that we worked with that have had success, like Rabobank, have transformed their fraud operations by not saying we have to use AI agents and go start to build these chatbots, but actually looking at what their fraud process is from beginning to end and then identifying where the most impactful areas are for me to apply AI within this. So, really putting the lens on, how do we adopt AI into our core operation rather than on the external bits of our operation?
Matt’s best advice: Accelerate your path to the cloud with AI agents like those embedded into Pega Blueprint.
Matt’s Punk CX brand: One that definitely isn’t punk is the Taco Bell drive-through AI order agent that kept adding random things to Matt’s order.

About Matt

Matt Healy is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Pega and leads product marketing and strategy for Pega Platform. He helps engage with enterprises to bring new solutions to life that enable faster legacy transformation, accelerated development, AI & automation at scale to unlock business agility, operational efficiency, and developer effectiveness.