an opportunity I raised at the time<\/a>.<\/p>\nOutSystems now argues that the sheer importance of the AI transformation means many of its customers are becoming increasingly concerned about the risks of concentration and dependency \u2014 something which may make cloud-native platforms governed by the laws of other jurisdictions less acceptable for enterprises worried about trusting their agents and business context to providers that could become subject to restrictions, tariffs or extraterritorial legal or political intervention.<\/p>\n
As a result, OutSystems appears to have decided that deployment control can become another potential source of competitive advantage as part of its category shift \u2014 one that opens a gap with less flexible providers by folding customer control over residency into its wider push on policy, governance and management. In that framing, the goal is to reassure customers that their agents \u2014 and the business context that enables them \u2014 remain more fully under their control.<\/p>\n
Dealing with agent sprawl<\/p>\n
The third part of OutSystems\u2019 category move focused on making agents governable at enterprise scale via Agentic Enterprise Orchestration \u2014 an extension of its developer-focused Agent Workbench to include guardrails, agent evaluation, model management and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) integration.<\/p>\n
The company framed the need for this extended governance capability by raising the risk of agent sprawl \u2014 something it claimed will accelerate as disparate teams continue to connect siloed agents, tools and context. While many vendors are pushing to become the management console for agents, the controls they introduce can sit above the enterprise rather than inside its operating fabric \u2014 reliant on telemetry and audit logs, but lacking a deeper understanding of how agent workloads move across workflows, systems and data.<\/p>\n
OutSystems\u2019 argument appears to be that its low-code infrastructure already governs other kinds of digital assets, and that by introducing Agentic Enterprise Orchestration it can deliver agent governance as an extension of this platform governance rather than a separate control layer. This, the company suggests, can make both agent outcomes and internal actions more visible \u2014 turning guardrails, evaluations, model management and A2A integration into another form of digital work to be managed.<\/p>\n
From a category perspective, OutSystems seems to be trying to set a buyer expectation that any serious Agentic Systems Platform must offer this depth of control by definition \u2014 and that agentic systems only become enterprise systems when their behavior, dependencies, costs and interactions are governed alongside the wider enterprise estate.<\/p>\n
Shifting from closed-loop to open infrastructure<\/p>\n
The fourth element of OutSystems\u2019 category definition focused on the agent build experience \u2014 and on expanding the scope of its Agentic Systems Engineering capabilities to recognize the increasing popularity of coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex.<\/p>\n
OutSystems\u2019 position here is that while AI code generation is powerful, it can also introduce significant cost, risk and verification overhead without a controlled and governed target environment.<\/p>\n
Because, in the company\u2019s telling, general-purpose coding agents have to reason from first principles about structure, relationships and dependencies at a low level \u2014 often reconstructing that context from scratch every time a change is made. It suggests that this burns tokens, leads to unmanaged change, and creates avoidable governance headaches in regulated environments \u2014 while also increasing the risk of agent mission drift as codebases sprawl and context windows get overloaded.<\/p>\n
Which is why OutSystems believes that its low-code heritage offers a better target for development agents. Rather than asking agents to manipulate raw code, the company has enabled them to work directly with its OutSystems Modeling Language (OML) \u2014 the abstraction layer used to describe applications, workflows, entities and logic \u2014 so that they have greater design guidance, reduced context requirements, and can take advantage of deterministic code generation from the resulting OML definitions.<\/p>\n
And while OutSystems is clearly responding to the threat posed by general-purpose coding agents here, it also appears to be making a bet that it can co-opt them \u2014 arguing that the more powerful those tools become, the more valuable a governed target environment becomes. In other words, it is trying to anchor its new category claim in a shift from a closed-loop development environment to open infrastructure for enterprise-grade agent delivery.<\/p>\n
Packaging agentic capabilities into new business solutions<\/p>\n
The final element of OutSystems\u2019 attempt at category shift was perhaps the least developed but potentially the most ambitious \u2014 focusing on business solutions rather than technical capabilities. In the short term, that ambition was centered on the introduction of its first Agentic Banking Solution, along with a wider invitation for partners to begin building, packaging and commercializing their own agentic offerings on the platform.<\/p>\n
The banking solution itself leverages OutSystems\u2019 agentic platform architecture to offer a customizable loan origination solution, including agents for customer intake, policy queries and fraud detection. To support these agents, it also includes pre-built banking data models and compliance workflows. But while this may help some OutSystems banking customers bootstrap their agentic journey, it also serves a wider purpose.<\/p>\n
OutSystems has long had the infrastructure necessary for customers to reuse the technical assets they have created on its platform, and the company is now hoping to extend this logic to the broader sharing of packaged solutions between organizations.<\/p>\n
And while the banking solution is the first of a promised suite of future business solutions from OutSystems itself, its more fundamental role may be to test the appetite of its ecosystem for building their own OutSystems-based commercial solutions. Because OutSystems appears to be signaling to its community and partners that business-solution packaging and commercial distribution are now integral to the platform category it wants to own \u2014 and hoping that a positive response can turn those present signals into future growth.<\/p>\n
My take<\/p>\n
The first thing that strikes me about OutSystems\u2019 announcements is how far the company has come over the last 12 months \u2014 and the almost direct throughline I see from Martin\u2019s early thoughts to the announcements in Amsterdam.<\/p>\n
Whatever one thinks of the event claims themselves, it is hard to deny that Martin seems to have re-invigorated and mobilized the company around his agentic vision \u2014 moving it from a low-code productivity story that was starting to feel a little stale towards a more ambitious architectural argument about enterprise AI. There also seemed to be genuine excitement among OutSystems\u2019 customers at the thought of building and managing agents within a familiar environment.<\/p>\n
Narratively, the category play feels strong because it grows out of a genuinely valuable foundation. OutSystems is not trying to invent an entirely new identity for itself, but to argue that the architectural choices it made long before the current AI wave to make technology systems understandable to humans \u2014 structured models, deterministic generation, governed runtime and reusable patterns \u2014 may now also do the same job for agents.<\/p>\n
And that does not feel like a vacuous claim, but rather one worthy of serious consideration.<\/p>\n
The narrative also lands during a time of real buyer anxiety about sovereignty, lock-in and geopolitical risk \u2014 which makes OutSystems\u2019 desire to position itself as a high-leverage brokerage layer across models, agents and clouds a potentially smart play. In fact, it may be the most strategically interesting part of the story.<\/p>\n
For buyers, of course, narrative coherence does not automatically translate into practical value \u2014 and eventually it is the market, rather than the vendor, that decides whether an attempt to create a new category will stick. The useful test from this perspective is not really whether the category name sticks, but whether the OutSystems advantages it\u2019s being use to reframe really do translate into future enterprises that are more agent-legible, controllable and effective than the alternatives.<\/p>\n
But, from what I saw at the event, OutSystems at least now has a credible case for why its past may be the best possible enabler of its customers\u2019 future \u2014 a case that, at the very least, seemed to meet with the enthusiastic approval of its famously committed community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Woodson Martin speaks at OutSystems One Amsterdam When I first spoke with OutSystems\u2019 new CEO Woodson Martin last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[101],"tags":[39901,34220,199,5007,51702,200,51701],"class_list":["post-100783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-amsterdam","tag-agentic-ai","tag-ai-adoption","tag-amsterdam","tag-audio","tag-collaboration-sharing-and-digital-productivity","tag-netherlands","tag-ux-and-application-design"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116698204602475696","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}