How Tomato AI’s CEO Positioned Against Zapier, Workato, and the Entire Automation Category

How Tomato AI’s CEO Positioned Against Zapier, Workato, and the Entire Automation Category

Category creation typically follows a formula: identify an underserved market, define a new category name, educate buyers on why they need it. The problem? Most buyers already have solutions they think work fine.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ofer Ronen, CEO and Co-founder of Tomato AI, explained how his team navigated one of B2B’s hardest positioning challenges: creating a new category while competing in an established one. Process orchestration isn’t workflow automation, and it isn’t an integration platform—but explaining that difference without losing prospects required surgical precision.

The result is a platform managing over 100,000 processes with “over $100 million in pipeline,” differentiated in a market dominated by billion-dollar competitors.

The Category Collision Problem

When prospects first encounter Tomato AI, they make immediate comparisons. The product connects systems and automates workflows—just like Zapier, Workato, and dozens of other automation tools they already know.

“We’re actually creating a new category,” Ofer explains. But category creation in 2024 isn’t about inventing something entirely novel. It’s about drawing distinctions in markets where buyers think existing solutions are sufficient.

The workflow automation category is mature. Companies already use these tools. Their teams know how they work. When someone says “we need to automate this process,” they default to familiar solutions.

Tomato AI needed to convince these same buyers that they had a different problem—one their existing automation tools couldn’t solve. Not because those tools were bad, but because they were built for different use cases.

Orchestration vs. Automation: The Core Distinction

The positioning challenge started with vocabulary. Automation and orchestration sound similar enough that prospects conflate them. Both involve connecting systems and triggering actions. Both reduce manual work.

But the underlying problems are fundamentally different. Automation connects point A to point B. When something happens in one system, trigger an action in another. Zapier excels at this. So does Workato. The challenge is linear: if this, then that.

Orchestration coordinates multiple systems and decision points across an entire process. When a vendor needs onboarding, route the request based on vendor type, trigger different approval chains depending on contract value, coordinate legal review and finance approval in parallel, update multiple systems as the process progresses, and handle exceptions at any step.

“Orchestration is one of these things that can be applied in so many different ways across your organization,” Ofer notes. The complexity isn’t in connecting two systems—it’s in managing the business logic that spans dozens of systems throughout a complete business process.

This distinction became Tomato AI’s positioning foundation. They weren’t competing with automation tools. They were solving the problem that remains after automation tools are already in place.

Positioning Through Use Case Specificity

Category creation theory says to define the category broadly, then dominate it. Ofer did the opposite. Rather than trying to own “process orchestration” as an abstract concept, Tomato AI let specific use cases demonstrate the difference.

When a procurement team explains their vendor onboarding process, they describe orchestration naturally: collecting information from the vendor, routing it to different approvers based on risk profile, coordinating legal and finance reviews, updating the ERP, notifying stakeholders, handling exceptions. They don’t describe simple automation.

Tomato AI positioned by letting these complex processes speak for themselves. “These processes belong to the business teams. They’re not IT-owned processes,” Ofer explains. This framing helped. IT teams think about automation as connecting systems. Business teams think about orchestration as managing their actual work processes.

By targeting business teams with process-level problems rather than IT teams with integration problems, Tomato AI naturally differentiated from automation platforms. The buyer was different, the problem was different, and the solution architecture was different.

The Competitive Judo Move

Rather than positioning against Zapier and Workato directly, Tomato AI positioned alongside them. Many Tomato AI customers use both—automation tools for simple connections, Tomato AI for process orchestration.

This positioning proved brilliant for several reasons. First, it avoided making prospects choose between familiar tools and an unknown category. Tomato AI could complement what they already had rather than replace it.

Second, it let prospects discover the distinction themselves. When someone tries using Zapier for a complex procurement workflow, they hit limitations quickly. Too many conditional branches. Too many exception cases. Too many systems to coordinate. The tool works fine, but it’s not built for this level of complexity.

That’s when Tomato AI’s positioning clicks. The prospect isn’t rejecting their automation tool as inadequate. They’re recognizing they have a different class of problem that requires a different class of solution.

Security as Category Differentiator

One positioning element proved especially effective in enterprise contexts: security architecture.

“We actually have more enterprise-grade security than Workato, than Zapier, than any of these other guys,” Ofer states. This wasn’t just a feature comparison—it reinforced the category distinction.

Automation tools typically handle low-risk, departmental workflows. Process orchestration handles business-critical processes spanning entire organizations. The security requirements are different because the use cases are different.

When Tomato AI highlighted their SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, comprehensive data governance, and enterprise security features, they weren’t just checking boxes. They were demonstrating that process orchestration operates at a different organizational level than workflow automation.

This positioning helped buyers understand the category intuitively. Low-security tools for simple automation. High-security platforms for business-critical orchestration. The security posture itself communicated category membership.

Letting Product Architecture Tell the Story

The most effective category differentiation came from product design itself. Tomato AI “built the product to be completely self-service,” allowing users to “connect it to all the different systems that they have, build a process, launch it into production.”

But the architecture underneath that self-service experience was fundamentally different from automation tools. Automation platforms connect systems through pre-built integrations and simple triggers. Tomato AI’s orchestration engine manages complex business logic, parallel processes, exception handling, and governance across entire workflows.

Users felt this difference even if they couldn’t articulate it. Building a simple automation in Zapier feels fast and constrained—you connect specific triggers to specific actions. Building a process in Tomato AI feels comprehensive and flexible—you define business logic that coordinates multiple systems.

This experiential difference validated the category distinction better than any positioning document could. Prospects who tried both understood viscerally why orchestration was different from automation.

The Practitioner-First Education Model

Most category creation strategies focus on executive education—whitepapers, analyst briefings, thought leadership. Ofer inverted this approach.

Rather than convincing CIOs that they needed process orchestration as a category, Tomato AI let practitioners discover it through hands-on use. When an operations manager builds their first orchestrated process and sees it coordinating actions across six different systems with complex conditional logic, they understand the category immediately.

This bottoms-up education proved more effective than top-down evangelism. Practitioners who experienced orchestration became internal champions who could explain the category to their executives in practical terms, not abstract concepts.

The education happened through product adoption rather than content marketing. By the time prospects reached sales conversations, they already understood what process orchestration was because they’d experienced it.

Where Category and Competition Intersect

Tomato AI’s positioning success came from recognizing that category creation and competitive differentiation aren’t separate strategies. They’re the same problem approached from different angles.

The category—process orchestration—exists because existing categories don’t solve certain problems well. The competition—Zapier, Workato, automation platforms—validates that the broader problem space is real, while their limitations demonstrate the need for a new approach.

“We’re definitely going after larger organizations,” Ofer confirms. These enterprises already use automation tools extensively. Tomato AI doesn’t position as a replacement. They position as the next evolution—the solution for problems that persist even after automation is in place.

For B2B founders navigating similar positioning challenges, Ofer’s approach offers a framework: define your category by the problems you solve differently, not just by what you do differently. Let product architecture and user experience communicate distinction more than messaging does. And recognize that category creation doesn’t require displacing competitors—sometimes it requires positioning alongside them as the solution for problems they can’t address.

Tomato AI proved that category creation in crowded markets isn’t about shouting louder than competitors. It’s about drawing distinctions that prospects recognize as meaningful once they see them.