OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin: AI, Agents and the Enterprise

Agentic AI is reshaping how enterprises operate. What once looked like an arcane discipline is fast becoming accessible, with low-code and no-code platforms allowing teams to design agents through simple prompts.

For the C-suite, this shift is less about novelty and more about competitive advantage, governance and speed. Democratised tooling can turn strategy into execution, link data to decisions and move routine work from people to software agents under clear controls.

OutSystems has emerged as a leader in this space, helping global organisations modernise legacy estates and scale AI-enabled workflows.

Under newly appointed CEO Woodson Martin, the company is positioning agentic AI as an enterprise capability rather than a lab experiment.

Martin’s experience scaling Salesforce’s AppExchange informs a pragmatic approach that balances rapid innovation with reliability, security and auditability - the qualities boards expect when digital change touches core systems.

For senior leaders, the prize is material: accelerated transformation without runaway complexity. Yet the mandate is also clear. Value needs measurable outcomes, not pilots, while autonomy must sit behind robust policies, risk frameworks and human oversight.

In this interview Woodson examines where agentic AI can drive P&L impact, how CEOs can set the right guardrails and why platform choices now will define organisational agility for years to come.

What does being CEO of OutSystems involve - how are you driving AI growth, for example?

I'm the newly appointed CEO of OutSystems, having joined the company in the Spring of 2025.

My objective is to grow OutSystems as the global leader in AI-powered software development, to help our more than 2,000 customers innovate in the age of AI and to build the agentic future together with our 500+ global partners. 

We recently surpassed €500m (US$581m) in annual revenue. This figure reflects our strong momentum and the trust customers place in our AI-powered software development platform. 

OutSystems pioneered low-code and we are leading the market in helping customers deliver tangible business results with AI agents, agentic systems and custom enterprise software that meets the most stringent requirements for security, governance and trust.  

I'm excited to guide this next chapter of the company’s growth and innovation.

As new CEO, did you set yourself a clear path, firm objectives and an overarching mission or goal?

The highest priority for the company is to lead in AI and the agentic future, building on the strong foundation that OutSystems has established as a pioneering AI-powered low-code platform.

My goal is to accelerate our growth, deepen customer impact and expand the role we play in enabling organisations to modernise legacy systems.

One of the biggest challenges is navigating a rapidly changing technology landscape, where global instability and uncertainty add an extra layer of complexity to the mix. For years now, AI, cloud and security expectations have been reshaping how software is built and delivered.  

Gen AI and vibe coding tools are incredibly exciting because they unleash creativity and potential across organisations. Suddenly, everyone can build software. But that’s also what makes it so intimidating for enterprise technology leaders.

Imagine being a Chief Information Security Officer and realising that employees across the company are now generating applications that touch your core systems, sensitive data and proprietary documents.

While some of those experiences are amazing, what’s often hidden beneath the surface is a tangle of messy, inconsistent code and a mountain of tech debt. That’s where a platform like OutSystems becomes essential.

For nearly 25 years, OutSystems has been empowering CIOs and CISOs to put innovation directly in the hands of business users and developers safely. Our platform was built with full observability, lifecycle management, rapid iteration and an infrastructure capable of supporting mission-critical systems. 

Now with OutSystems Mentor, our AI for enterprise vibe coding, we’re taking that even further. Developers can build applications through natural conversations with AI, while the underlying code is generated deterministically, which means it’s consistent, secure and production-ready every time.

This combination of creative freedom and control is what enterprises truly need. So I believe mature platforms like OutSystems will be the foundation that keeps innovation safe, sustainable and scalable.

How does OutSystems help organisations with AI adoption and transformation?

OutSystems provides an AI-driven app and agent development platform that allows organisations to design, build and deploy enterprise AI-powered solutions with speed and scale.

By combining a proven low-code foundation with AI-driven development, we empower developers to deliver enterprise-grade solutions up to 10 times faster than traditional coding, without compromising on security, governance or performance.

In the tech sector, we are at the intersection of enterprise software and developer productivity. OutSystems enables customer success with the latest technologies in ways that are manageable, governable, fit into existing enterprise architectures and help organisations get real business value.

Our goal is to give teams the agility to innovate securely, without being constrained by packaged systems or slowed down by ungoverned code.

As a result, our solution has become the right choice for organisations across the globe to drive their most transformational initiatives.

From Western Union in the US to Toyota in Japan, OutSystems helps companies modernise core systems, revamp business processes and create innovative digital experiences while creating a path for them to thrive in this agentic future.

What kind of projects do you work on and are there certain industries you serve?

We serve thousands of organisations worldwide, across industries ranging from financial services and healthcare to government and manufacturing.

Full spectrum – organisations of any size are able to quickly take advantage of agentic systems to dramatically improve business performance. Our platform is trusted for projects that modernise legacy systems, accelerate digital transformation and bring AI-powered innovation to life at scale.

Take Toyota, for example. What began with modernising legacy production systems has grown into more than 70 projects across 23 Toyota Group companies, helping them transform from a car manufacturer to a mobility specialist.

By using OutSystems, Toyota has cut development work hours by around 30% while transitioning to an agile model that improves speed and user satisfaction.

In the financial services sector, Western Union leveraged OutSystems to launch a new digital banking platform in just 11 months, at least twice as fast as competitors. Western Union is now using the platform in multiple layers of its business.

In the UK, Acacium Group, a leading healthcare delivery partner, built an intelligent staff-matching app powered by Gen AI in just four weeks. It saved them more than 2,000 hours in its first three months by helping recruitment teams automatically shortlist candidates based on defined parameters.

In these first five months as CEO, I've seen OutSystems deliver the scale, speed and dependability enterprises need for their most transformational initiatives, from global supply chains to digital banking and AI in healthcare.

From an enterprise perspective, how drastically will AI reshape the future for businesses and their leaders?

AI is changing how software is imagined and built. But many organisations are still struggling with ungoverned point solutions, siloed data and 'pilot purgatory', where less than 10% of high-value use cases ever reach production.

Others face a familiar dilemma: accept the limitations of packaged software or take the risk of stitching together untested AI tools to build custom solutions. 

When I think about the future, I envision really well-trained, contextually aware agents that can build custom software to solve business problems.

OutSystems is moving in that direction. We’re embedding AI into the development lifecycle to help developers move faster and smarter. And we're using agentic AI to shift the focus from simply generating code to creating autonomous agents that can reason, plan and act within enterprise systems.

That’s why we launched Agent Workbench. It enables agents to collaborate, access the right enterprise data and operate under clear guardrails like real-time monitoring and auditability.

For instance, our Dutch customer TravelEssence, a company that specialises in luxury travel, is using it to create an AI-powered itinerary builder supported by a team of specialised AI agents.

Each agent focuses on a specific task, like finding accommodations, optimising rental cars or managing flights, while human staff can concentrate on high-touch, high-value customer interactions. 

So, concretely for businesses, this means AI is not just experimental but should be truly embedded in workflows and delivering value at scale.

For the tech sector more broadly, it means faster innovation, but also a greater responsibility to ensure AI is reliable, safe, compliant, transparent and ethical. Our goal is to make sure AI augments human creativity, rather than replacing it.

What are your thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg suggesting that most code will be written by AI in the near future?

He may have said it, but that's not exactly a ground-breaking observation. AI is already writing the majority of new code, and it’s clearly going to generate even more. And that’s actually kind of a problem.

In reality, 99.9% of what gets generated never sees the light of day. It’s generated, played with and discarded long before it ever accomplishes anything. And what I’m hearing from CIOs and CISOs who are using AI to generate code in the enterprise is that a lot of that code is spaghetti code. And these leaders see lots of potential but even more risk. 

That’s where OutSystems is focused. Getting reliable, scalable, secure agentic systems into production – the kind that actually run a hospital or a bank.

That’s where AI can truly make a difference, not by flooding GitHub with half-finished experiments, but by accelerating the work of real developers who understand context, intent and accountability.

We see the future as more than "AI writing all the code". We see AI being used at every layer and empowering developers to master the hardest 80% of their job: integrating systems, testing, optimising performance and delivering creative solutions that produce lasting business value.