OutSystems Mentor: An AI-powered digital assistant for the entire SDLC

Today’s developers navigate a complex landscape marked by slow development cycles, skills gaps, talent shortages, high customization costs, and tightening budgets. The burden of maintaining legacy systems, while adapting to business evolution, adds further strain. With the pressure to drive ROI from software investments, organizations often find themselves caught in the “build vs. buy” dilemma, only to find that off-the-shelf software falls short of meeting their digital transformation needs or delivering a competitive advantage.

At the same time, the recent AI coding assistants and AI platforms that promise to generate full-stack applications often fall short. Ungoverned generative AI (genAI) generates as many risks as it does lines of code, including hallucinations, security holes, architectural flaws, and unexcutable code. In fact, 62% of IT professionals report that using genAI for coding has raised new concerns around security and governance.

It’s the perfect storm for IT teams, but there is hope. A new generation of AI-powered low-code development tools addresses these challenges head-on. Designed to help teams accelerate enterprise application development, free up time for innovation, and maintain observability and governance, offerings like OutSystems Mentor reimagine the software development life cycle (SDLC) altogether.

Introducing OutSystems Mentor

In October 2024, OutSystems introduced Mentor, an AI-powered digital assistant for the entire SDLC. Combining low-code, generative AI, and AI-driven guidance, Mentor represents a major step forward in how software is created, managed, and updated—all within the OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC) platform.

Mentor is an AI-powered team member trained to support or complete sequential tasks and even entire processes. Integrating generative AI, natural language processing, industry-leading AI models, and machine learning, Mentor provides intelligent, context-aware support across the development workflow, accelerating the creation of full-stack enterprise applications that are easy to maintain via low-code. In doing so, Mentor helps teams maintain a competitive edge without the high costs associated with traditional coding, and without having to maintain hard-to-understand code created by other developers, AI co-pilots, or conversational app builders.

Mentor is fully integrated with the OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC), allowing organizations to scale from prototype to enterprise-grade deployment while maintaining control and reducing technical debt. With ODC as the foundation, Mentor enables a more efficient, secure, and scalable approach to AI-driven development, supporting teams in delivering high-quality applications faster and with greater consistency.

Generate fully functional, scalable applications

From discovery to rapid prototyping, IT teams can use Mentor to validate ideas and refine initial designs, ensuring alignment before committing to full-scale development. This early-stage clarity helps save time and maximize the impact of every effort, while reducing friction between business and technical teams by creating a shared understanding from day one.

Mentor’s development process is intuitive. Developers describe the application they need, whether through a short prompt or a detailed requirements document. Mentor then combines this input with contextual awareness from the user’s environment, automatically generating an initial version of the app. This includes front-end functionality, data models, and embedded business logic tailored to the organization’s ecosystem.

Further differentiating itself from other AI coding tools, Mentor identifies relevant entities from existing applications or external systems, along with key roles, attributes, records, and workflows needed to generate the app, giving users a head start on development that’s integrated and in tune with real-world needs and organizational context.

Improve, iterate, and evolve applications with AI-powered suggestions

Creating a minimum viable product (MVP) is arguably the most challenging hurdle to overcome in application development. Constant improvement and quick iterations are critical because they ensure products, processes, and services remain relevant, competitive, and aligned with evolving customer needs.

The journey from MVP to production-ready is accelerated with Mentor’s intelligent App Editor, which analyzes an application’s structure and data model and offers AI-powered suggestions for real-time improvements. Whether optimizing performance, refining UX, or improving maintainability, developers can level up their applications with speed, confidence, and precision, reducing rework and accelerating delivery.

Developers also have the option to step outside the App Editor for any additional editing and customization using the ODC Studio, the integrated development environment (IDE) for OutSystems Developer Cloud. Any changes made to the application are reflected back in App Editor, and users can continue refining their app with AI-driven suggestions, enabling a fluid workflow.

Embed AI agents within apps to automate digital interactions

Also built on ODC, OutSystems AI Agent Builder automates tasks with customizable intelligent agents and integrates them into OutSystems Developer Cloud apps to leverage generative AI. This enables IT teams to quickly and securely infuse apps with genAI agents, bringing conversational agentic interactions to life in minutes, without any coding or deep AI expertise.

AI Agent Builder streamlines the process of AI integration, making powerful functionality accessible to a broader range of teams. With a combination of large language models and retrieval-augmented generation, the AI Agent Builder allows users to create intelligent agents (backed by the organization’s proprietary knowledge) via simple, natural language inputs. By enhancing applications with intelligent, conversational interfaces, the platform drives real outcomes, such as when an AI customer service agent can automatically address and resolve customer issues.

IT teams using OutSystems AI Agent Builder gain full control and access to models, proprietary data, and agents in a single, scalable platform. With built-in monitoring tools, the AI Agent Builder enables continuous performance tracking and optimization, ensuring agents not only adapt and improve over time but also deliver accurate, trustworthy results aligned with evolving business goals. Organizations can scale AI capabilities confidently, without sacrificing oversight or accountability.

Validate and maintain applications through AI-powered code reviews

Before any application is deployed to production, Mentor validates and maintains applications via AI-powered code reviews across every layer of the stack. Doing so ensures all applications meet the highest possible standards for development, security, performance, architecture, and long-term maintainability. Catching issues early and enforcing consistent standards also helps teams avoid costly rework and technical debt.

Taking a proactive approach to quality assurance, Mentor continuously scans applications every 12 hours, flagging potential issues or security risks within a unified dashboard. This ongoing monitoring ensures that quality and compliance are embedded into the development life cycle, helping teams stay ahead of issues and deliver software with confidence.

Shaping the future of AI app and agent development

At this inflection point, software development is undergoing a transformative shift, enabling faster, more efficient, and smarter processes. With the integration of AI-driven low-code tools like OutSystems Mentor, development teams can harness the power of automation, intelligent insights, and SDLC recommendations, accelerating innovation and staying ahead in an ever-evolving digital landscape.

AI isn’t replacing developers—it’s handling the grunt work, from troubleshooting code to enabling rapid app creation, freeing developers to be creative orchestrators and grow into leadership roles. But this is only the beginning.

As teams grow more comfortable integrating AI into their development processes, the next step is embracing AI agents. OutSystems is actively building towards this future, where autonomous AI agents take on more complex tasks and interact with systems independently, driving business processes and decision-making.

At OutSystems, our vision is to empower every company to innovate through software. OutSystems Mentor and our forthcoming AI-powered products are testaments to this vision, revolutionizing how applications are built and orchestrated, driving faster, smarter innovation at scale.

Luis Blando is chief product and technology officer at OutSystems.

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