Create Your Own Employee: Inside OutSystems Agent Workbench
Have you ever wished you had a clone that you could send into work when you need to see to something particularly laborious? That, in short, is the promise of agentic AI.
With this form of AI, users are able to double their capacity in an instant.
Gen AI has already been widely adopted across the working world, with companies using it to write emails, create eye-catching imagery or sort through huge data sets. Agentic AI is different, though. Agents have... well, agency.
Agentic AI can work completely independently of human oversight, meaning workers don’t need to feed agents prompts to dictate their actions — you just let them do their thing.
Of course, it is all a little more complicated and nuanced than this explanation might suggest. Thus far, some enterprises have struggled to create and deploy AI agents that are suited to their unique needs.
To address this, OutSystems, a low-code enterprise IT platform, has announced the launch of its Agent Workbench system, designed to be an easy way of creating and customising agentic AI.
The Boston-based company positions the offering as a solution to what it sees as widespread struggles with AI implementation across sectors.
“Organisations are excited by the promise of AI and agentic systems, but are struggling with endless pilots and ungoverned tool sprawl while the business impact stalls,” explains Woodson Martin, CEO of OutSystems.
“Legacy systems, siloed data, fragmented AI tools, and complex AI development cycles are slowing progress.
“We built Agent Workbench to make it possible to unlock custom agents as a true business enabler — not an experiment,” he says.
Enterprise-grade agent development
Agent Workbench allows organisations to transform existing business applications, workflows and tools into what OutSystems describes as intelligent, agentic systems capable of reasoning, planning and taking action.
The platform integrates with existing IT infrastructure without requiring wholesale system changes, potentially reducing implementation friction for enterprise customers.
IT teams can deploy agentic AI capabilities across enterprise operations whilst maintaining current workflows and core system architectures.
Agent Workbench supports integration with both custom AI models and third-party providers including Azure OpenAI and AWS Bedrock, giving organisations flexibility in their AI vendor relationships.
Data integration and workflow orchestration
The platform connects to diverse enterprise data sources, including OutSystems 11 data, relational databases, data lakes and knowledge retrieval systems such as Amazon Kendra and Azure AI Search.
This unified data fabric approach aims to provide AI agents with comprehensive context for more accurate responses across different business workflows.
Agent Workbench enables multi-agent workflows where different AI agents can collaborate on complex tasks, working in parallel, sequential or hierarchical configurations.
The system includes dynamic process flow adjustment capabilities, allowing agents to adapt their operations based on real-time understanding of enterprise systems.
Human intervention mechanisms are built into the workflow orchestration, providing escalation pathways when agent capabilities reach their limits.
“Agent Workbench is built for pragmatic leaders who are ready to put AI to real work and move beyond AI pilots to production, delivering business value,” says Ben Sekhon, VP for the UK & Ireland at OutSystems.
Governance and monitoring measures
OutSystems has incorporated enterprise-grade monitoring capabilities into Agent Workbench, including real-time logging, error tracing and built-in guardrails.
These features are designed to provide transparency in AI decision-making processes and enable organisations to audit agent behaviour.
The platform includes mechanisms to prevent AI hallucinations and maintain ‘explainability’ (the ability to understand how an AI model arrived at its decisions) in agent operations, addressing common enterprise concerns about AI reliability.
Market positioning and availability
It is a work-in-progress, but OutSystems are reaching out to businesses that want to try something new.
“We’re inviting forward-thinking teams to join our Early Adopters Program,” says Gonçalo Borrêga, VP for Product, AI & App Development at OutSystems.
“If you’re ready to be hands-on with AI agents, help us shape the experience, and push the boundaries of what companies around the globe can create with Agentic AI, we want to work with you.”