Rodrigo Coutinho is a co-founder and AI Product Manager at OutSystems. Since co-founding the corporate in 2001, he has had a decisive participation within the design and vision of the product, particularly, its architecture and visual language. From day one, he focused on developing progressive and pragmatic ways to extend the speed of delivery of enterprise applications. He’s now answerable for doubling down on this goal through the use of AI to extend productivity by an order of magnitude.
OutSystems is a low-code platform powered by generative AI that helps organizations rapidly construct, manage, and evolve enterprise-grade applications. It enables faster development of mission-critical software, encourages collaboration between IT and business teams, and supports scalable, cloud-native architecture—streamlining the complete software lifecycle while reducing backlogs.
How is AI transforming the low-code development landscape?
Latest AI tools are bringing two significant transformations to low-code: productivity and communication methods. Generative AI helps low-code developers construct applications faster and with higher quality. Models are trained using architectural best practices, which ensures the suggestions presented to the developers are sound. As well as, generative AI can be utilized in other parts of the lifecycle, like app design, app validation, and staging, accelerating the speed from idea to app even faster.
The second big transformation, a consequence of the primary one, is that the communication between IT and business will change dramatically. With the power to make use of AI and low-code to create the primary version of the applying in minutes and large changes in seconds, the applying may be made along with the business. As an alternative of communicating through requirements documents, IT can show an actual running application in real-time.
This may transform the role of IT, bringing developers to the table, and enabling innovation to spur from the conjunction of business with technology.
What are the important thing benefits of AI-powered low-code development over traditional coding approaches?
Unlike traditional code with AI, low-code platforms powered by AI – like OutSystems Mentor – overcome key challenges reminiscent of orphaned code, poor code quality, and lack of transparency and explainability. This is feasible because low-code tools like OutSystems use high-level models that abstract the complexities of code, making it feasible to validate the generated application to make sure that it really works and follows best practices.
What challenges do organizations face when implementing AI-driven low-code platforms?
There are a couple of things that organizations need to pay attention to when selecting and implementing these low-code powered platforms. First, search for a platform that uses AI to boost the complete SDLC, not only code generation. Second, take into consideration how the tool will help change how we work. As an example, with Mentor, OutSystems goals to alter the connection between IT and the business, something that may have a much deeper impact on organizations beyond just increasing developer productivity.
Finally, staying compliant could be a challenge for organizations using AI-driven low-code platforms. Developer teams must remember not to hurry past audits for compliance red flags or potential security vulnerabilities and at all times involve legal teams, particularly when working with customers or sensitive data. That’s why OutSystems has already adjusted for this, providing a framework that routinely ensures data governance and regulatory compliance.
What sets OutSystems aside from other low-code development platforms?
OutSystems is designed to deliver the most effective developer experience with essentially the most sophisticated AI and generative AI toolset within the low-code market. The OutSystems platform powers AI-driven development for unparalleled speed and scale with AI tools to deal with security vulnerabilities, technical debt, and other maintenance issues. Our automated AI agent builder allows IT teams to simply construct GenAI-infused apps without advanced GenAI expertise.
OutSystems can be the one LCAP platform that may be utilized in any use case, providing unparalleled performance and scale that may support even essentially the most unpredictable and inconsistent traffic. While you construct on OutSystems, you’re constructing apps which are —and can at all times be —yours, with easy integration with other technologies and existing infrastructures, and without partitions or limitations on functionalities.
How does AI help enterprises resolve the ‘buy vs. construct’ dilemma in software development?
AI and low-code platforms are making custom-built software more accessible, cost-effective and adaptable, giving enterprises latest opportunities to construct their very own platforms at a fraction of the normal cost. Moreover, AI-powered low-code development platforms mean you can construct your tech stack much faster using fewer resources.
The truth is that AI is shifting the balance of power here – corporations which have previously had to speculate in costly customizations of off-the-shelf software, often sacrificing control and visibility for financial reasons, now have access to latest avenues to construct software that works specifically for them.
What’s OutSystems Mentor, and the way does it leverage AI to automate the total software development lifecycle (SDLC)?
OutSystems Mentor is the industry’s first full software development lifecycle (SDLC) digital employee, enabling app generation, delivery, and monitoring, all powered by low-code and GenAI. Mentor introduces a real “shift-left” approach to app creation, enabling developers to begin earlier in the method. Starting with discovery and rapid prototyping, IT teams can validate ideas and refine initial designs before full-scale development. Users simply describe the app they need or their vision, and Mentor generates an initial version with front-end functionality, data models, and embedded business logic. By automating app prototyping and ensuring best-in-class code quality, Mentor redefines the SDLC.
What differentiates Mentor from other AI-powered low-code development tools?
Mentor transforms software development and management workflows into a significant competitive differentiator. Using AI-driven app generation, optimization, automated quality checks, and agents all under the governance of centralized IT, Mentor boosts developer productivity while ensuring applications meet the best quality standards. Moreover, Mentor allows this to happen at a speed previously thought unattainable, enabling teams to do more with their time and adjust as needed throughout development.
Unlike traditional code with generative AI, Mentor overcomes key challenges reminiscent of orphaned code, poor code quality, and lack of transparency and explainability. It ensures teams maintain control, reduce technical debt, and fully harness the potential of AI-driven software development, making it a better, more efficient selection for contemporary, rapid application development.
Mentor is secure by design to fulfill all data governance requirements and standards to make sure compliance and security. Its model-driven development allows for easier maintainability by specializing in models relatively than code, ultimately empowering developers to give attention to the projects at hand.
How does Mentor’s AI-driven approach improve governance and security in comparison with traditional GenAI tools?
With Mentor, teams can validate and maintain applications through AI-powered code reviews, ensuring all applications meet the best possible standards for development, security, performance, architecture and long-term maintainability. By implementing these reviews from the start, developers can maintain data governance and visibility at every step of the method.
Mentor also proactively and usually checks for issues that may suggest a compromise in quality or security once an app is within the production environment. All critical facets of those applications – reminiscent of architecture, security, performance, and maintenance – may be closely monitored and checked for best coding practices and quality throughout the event cycle. At OutSystems, we place paramount importance on enterprise security and recognize how vital it’s to safeguard our platform and the universe of applications built by our customers, ultimately empowering our customers to construct secure applications, leveraging OutSystems technology and cloud-based services without requiring deep technical expertise in security.
How does Mentor’s AI architecture orchestrate multiple agents to speed up application development?
Mentor is a digital employee: a non-human, AI-powered team member trained to finish or support sequential tasks and even entire processes. It uses a mixture of generative AI prompts, natural language processing, leading AI models, and machine learning to automate tedious, disparate, and complicated processes and augment the work of humans.
Mentor utilizes multiple agents, each specializing in a selected aspect of application development, to rapidly generate fully functional applications by collaborating on different parts of the project concurrently, significantly reducing development time while maintaining quality by leveraging the strengths of every agent throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
How does OutSystems plan to evolve its AI capabilities in the approaching years?
At OutSystems, our AI strategy is centered around using AI and machine learning to speed up iterative application development, improving security, performance and agility, and constructing GenAI-powered applications to speed up transformation. As we expand our product offerings through Mentor and our AI Agent Builder, we’ll proceed to tap into GenAI and agentic AI to empower IT teams to innovate without limits.
