Software That Never Breaks: OutSystems CEO Woodson Martin on Building Enterprise-Grade Apps at ...

Nathan Labenz (0:00)

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 Paolo Rosato 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 built for customers and forecast the associated ROI.

Toward the end, we get Woodson's strategic analysis on the future of the software industry, including how competition will shape up as platforms expand to serve many adjacent niches, what companies should do to differentiate themselves as everyone begins to do everything, and why he's super bullish on AI-pilled junior talent.

From the outside, it's often said that for all the amazing things that AI can do, we still haven't seen measurable impact on productivity or global GDP growth. But I think you'll agree, after hearing Woodson's perspective from the helm of a platform that serves many of the world's most consequential and often conservative companies, that change is indeed very well underway. With that, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Woodson Martin, CEO of OutSystems. Woodson Martin, CEO of OutSystems. Welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

Woodson Martin (3:16)

Thanks, Nathan. Exciting times. Good to be here.

Nathan Labenz (3:19)

Yeah. Boy, never a dull moment in the AI game these days.

I wanted to start with a sociological question for you because in doing my homework, I learned that you took over OutSystems from a legendary founding CEO who had led the business for 24 years. And this just has me thinking, what an interesting time to go through a leadership transition at a software company, to be in your position of taking over a software company, to be a company looking for a new leader. That stuff is always fraught. But in the AI, there's this whole other dimension of like, where is this company on their journey? Where is this leader in terms of his vision is, who gets it, who doesn't get it? So I'd love to hear the story of the thought process and how you guys got to understand one another well enough to know that it would be a fit going into the AI era.

Woodson Martin (4:11)

Yeah, great. I'll start with Paolo Rosato, who we're talking about here. Paolo's a badass.

He started OutSystems with a very bold vision back in 2001, and that vision endures. And it was the idea that like custom enterprise software and people build really complex systems, custom ERPs, terminal management systems, global financial consolidation for re-insurance companies on OutSystems as a platform. But those projects at that time, custom software projects, were always years late, way over-budget, super unpredictable, and resulted in very rigid software that, you know, when you wanted to change it, it was another whole huge project. And Paolo was like, this is crazy, there's a better way. And his vision was simple, build faster, reliably every time, and evolve software at the pace of the business without breaking anything.

And that's still the core of what OutSystems does today.

Of course, now, we build all that stuff with AI, agents doing most of the work, right? But the result is that enterprise AI just works every time, all the time. So it's kind of been amazing how enduring his initial vision was and the platform fundamentals he built. And kind of that was what got me excited and inspired about OutSystems. 16 months ago when I joined was really understanding how powerful these platform primitives that the company had built that let like relatively unskilled technical users, developers build really complex enterprise systems, change them fast without breaking stuff. That was revolutionary at the time, but it's needed even more now, right? When AI can build all the stuff for us, the pace at which we build, the sheer volume of stuff we're managing, like that never breaks feature, turns out to be even more important. So that's kind of what got me inspired about OutSystems as a business and as an opportunity. And then it was just meeting customers. Like the enthusiasm for the platform, because of what that made possible for so many people and so many companies, like people just love the product. And you always want to be in a situation where your customers and your users love the technology. And so that's been a big part of it for me too.