OutSystems

This brings us to AI governance.

A recent survey by OutSystems found that many organizations lack robust AI governance frameworks.

This is a significant blind spot, increasing the risk of unmonitored AI deployments and potential compliance violations.

As AI becomes more embedded in business processes, the need for clear policies, cross-functional oversight, and continuous monitoring grows.

But for now, he spends his seven years at Splunk, while its yearly revenue grew from about $60 million to over a billion.

He then ran revenue at the software company OutSystems.

Today, he's the founder and CEO of Scalabrium, which helps sales and customer teams build the habits that make growth repeatable.

He's also living this right now, building his own company without burning cash.

Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.

Today, my guest is Woodson Martin, CEO of OutSystems, the pioneering enterprise software development platform that's helped many of the world's largest companies build and run complex mission-critical applications since its founding in 2001, and which now specializes in helping those same giants build, orchestrate, and govern agentic systems.

Woodson took over for OutSystems' legendary founding CEO, Paulo Rosado, in 2025, so we start with his thoughts on leadership transitions in the AI era, including how he assessed the company's AI readiness and what it was seeking in a new leader.

From there, we go on to discuss what makes a software platform enterprise-grade in today's world, with Woodson emphasizing the importance of human trust established over years, and also the critical role that well-designed software abstractions play in allowing coding agents to accelerate the development process while still delivering on the company's core promise of software that never breaks.

For OutSystems customers, which include Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled energy company, Vodafone, one of the world's largest mobile carriers, and Toyota, the world's largest car maker, among many, many others, this new paradigm makes it possible to accelerate product roadmaps to the point that some of them are actually starting to clear what had previously been ever-growing development backlogs.

Woodson says that most of what their customers are shipping today is still traditional deterministic applications that don't really require frontier AI.

But internally at OutSystems, they've gone from four major feature releases in Q4 to 19 in Q1 and 26 in Q2.

And meanwhile, they're rapidly agentifying their own business with major initiatives, including a customer-facing application development assistant, which they call Mentor, an in-house AI infrastructure investment that's built a new harness and a custom gateway, which has allowed them to reduce their token spend from a peak in June and July to being below their projections today, and a new agent foundry that they're using to suggest new agentic systems to build for customers and forecast the associated ROI.