Beyond the Launch: How OutSystems and AWS Plan to Tame Enterprise AI

SINGAPORE – June 03, 2026 – In a move that aims to cut through the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, software development platform OutSystems has announced a significant expansion of its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The partnership introduces a suite of new capabilities designed to tackle the three thorniest challenges preventing large enterprises from truly harnessing AI: crippling technical debt from legacy systems, the chaotic fragmentation of AI models, and the critical lack of governance for autonomous systems.

This collaboration isn't just about building AI features faster. It's about architecting a new, more responsible future for enterprise operations. By integrating its platform with powerful AWS services like Kiro, Transform, and Amazon Bedrock, OutSystems is positioning itself as a foundational layer for building, managing, and, most importantly, controlling the next wave of business automation: agentic systems.

"The shift toward agentic systems is the most significant architectural evolution of our lifetime," said Woodson Martin, CEO of OutSystems, in the announcement. "By collaborating with AWS, we are removing the friction between an organization's legacy past and its agentic future. We are providing the foundation to architect an entirely new generation of governed business systems."

What is an 'Agentic' Enterprise?

Before diving into the solution, it's crucial to understand the concept at its core. "Agentic AI" represents a significant leap beyond the generative AI tools that have captured public imagination. While generative AI excels at creating content, agentic AI is designed to act. These are autonomous systems engineered to perceive their digital environment, reason through complex problems, make decisions, and execute multi-step tasks to achieve specific goals with minimal human oversight.

Think of an AI agent as a digital employee. It uses a large language model (LLM) as its 'brain' to understand requests and plan actions, then utilizes a set of tools—APIs, databases, and other software—to carry out its work. In finance, an agent could autonomously process a loan application, from initial data validation to compliance checks and final approval. In retail, it could manage inventory, analyze sales trends, and automatically adjust pricing and promotions. The potential is vast, but so is the risk.

Industry analysts are watching this space with a mix of excitement and caution. Gartner's 2026 Hype Cycle for Agentic AI places AI agent development platforms squarely at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations." While the potential benefits are high, the path to mainstream adoption is estimated to be 2-5 years. More soberingly, some analysts predict that over 40% of agentic AI projects initiated today could be canceled by the end of 2027 due to spiraling costs, a lack of clear business value, or inadequate risk controls. This looming "Trough of Disillusionment" highlights the urgent need for a more structured, governed approach.

Modernizing the Past to Build the Future

For most established companies, the biggest barrier to an AI-powered future is the past. Decades of mission-critical operations are often running on aging platforms like COBOL or Lotus Notes. This legacy code represents immense technical debt, acting as an anchor that stalls innovation. Manually rewriting these systems is prohibitively expensive and risky.

This is where the OutSystems and AWS collaboration offers its first tangible solution: Legacy Modernization Services powered by AWS Transform. This new offering uses AI-accelerated tooling to translate aging codebases directly into modern, high-performance applications built on the OutSystems platform. By automating much of this complex conversion process, the service promises to drastically lower the cost and time required to modernize.

This isn't just about replacing old code with new. It's a strategic move to build a stable foundation upon which new agentic systems can be built. By bringing core business logic out of inaccessible legacy environments and into a modern, flexible platform, enterprises can finally connect their most valuable historical data and processes to the power of autonomous AI agents. This directly addresses a fundamental roadblock, enabling organizations in sectors like banking, insurance, and government to innovate without having to perform a complete corporate lobotomy.

A New Playbook for AI Governance and Control

With the foundation modernized, the next challenge is control. How does an enterprise manage a fleet of autonomous AI agents without creating security vulnerabilities, compliance breaches, or operational chaos? How does it manage a growing and fragmented landscape of AI models from different vendors without getting locked into a single ecosystem?

The answer lies in the deep integration with AWS's AI infrastructure. First, OutSystems announced a native integration with Kiro, an Agentic Development Environment from AWS. This allows developers to build and manage agents within their preferred coding environments while ensuring that every system is, as the company states, "governed by design." By making OutSystems a "Kiro Power" platform, the collaboration provides a centralized hub to orchestrate the entire development lifecycle, embedding security and compliance checks from the very beginning.

Second, the launch of Bedrock-Powered Agentic Orchestration addresses the problem of model fragmentation. Amazon Bedrock provides access to a wide variety of leading AI models through a single API. The OutSystems integration leverages this to create a sophisticated orchestration layer. This allows an enterprise to intelligently route agentic workloads to the most cost-effective and high-performing model for a given task, all while maintaining centralized oversight and governance. This open approach is a strategic hedge against LLM lock-in, a growing concern for CIOs wary of betting their entire AI strategy on a single provider.

From Experimentation to Enterprise-Grade Impact

Ultimately, the value of any new technology lies in its real-world application. The partnership is already showing signs of resonance with business leaders tasked with navigating digital transformation.

"At Globus Family of Brands, we see strong value in platforms that give us flexibility, speed, and scalability as we evolve our digital and AI capabilities," noted Lucy Donaldson, the company's CIO. "The collaboration between OutSystems and AWS expands the options available to organizations looking to innovate faster while modernizing responsibly."

This sentiment reflects a broader industry shift from isolated AI experiments to the deployment of high-consequence agentic systems. Early adopters are already demonstrating the potential. Financial services firms are using agents to automate complex credit policy checks, while manufacturing giants like Honda have embarked on company-wide initiatives to modernize legacy systems, reporting significant gains in operational efficiency.

By packaging legacy modernization, governed development, and open model orchestration into a unified platform, OutSystems and AWS are making a compelling case. They are not just selling AI tools; they are offering a comprehensive blueprint for transforming an organization. In a competitive landscape that includes Microsoft's Power Platform, Mendix, and Salesforce, this deeply integrated, governance-first approach with a cloud hyperscaler provides a powerful differentiator, aiming to make the promise of the autonomous enterprise a manageable and impactful reality.