Human in the Loop

Uniting Citizen Developers with ProDevs and AI

• By Howard M. Cohen
• July 9, 2025

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms (LCAP) tells us that OutSystems is firmly in the Leaders Quadrant, being furthest to the right, meaning it has the "greatest completeness of vision." It's also third from the top, which indicates a high ability to execute.

Were we asked to estimate how long LCAPs have been around, most would estimate since sometime in the mid-2010s. (I asked Copilot and that was the answer it returned!) OutSystems was out there in the market far earlier.

A Complete Reversal of Software Delivery

The introduction to the OutSystems Evaluation Guide explains, "In 2001, OutSystems started with a vision: a complete reversal of software delivery. The founders of OutSystems were seasoned IT professionals who recognized that a large majority of software projects were failing. The projects either did not meet the deadlines or their budget was overrun."

Almost a quarter-century ago the company likely hadn't even envisioned Citizen Developers when it introduced its platform. It was originally designed for professional developers (ProDevs) to solve a very specific problem. They explain,

"A great deal of time is spent trying to plan for everything needed in an application to ensure that it is 'right the first time.' The problem is that it's just not practical to know every requirement that might be needed in an application or plan for every eventuality."

Clearly the solution was to create a platform that would "make changes to applications fast, robust and inexpensive at any point in the lifecycle." The OutSystems Platform was born.

Prepared for the Future

It would be another eight years before Patrick Debois would coin the term "DevOps" to bring software developers and system operators together to respond to the need for faster application delivery and accelerated change cycles created by the growing trend that would be called digital transformation just a few years later.
With their October 2024 introduction of their Mentor AI-driven application generator, OutSystems continues to demonstrate leadership as we continue to hurtle toward the crossroad between LCAP and Generative AI.

Speaking at the OutSystems ONE Conference, CEO & Founder Paulo Rosado explained the mission for their new Mentor AI. "The Generative Software Cycle is here," he said. "In fact, 93% of executives are planning to increase their investment in AI-powered solutions, driving developer productivity and value creation to unprecedented heights. But speed can lead to technical debt and security issues if not managed carefully. With OutSystems Mentor, developers can now build full-stack applications in minutes, without sacrificing quality, security, or governance. Mentor ensures apps are built right from the start, changing how software development gets done."

Competition for OutSystems has recently expanded. Not only are they competing with the many other LCAP providers, but with Mentor they have placed themselves in fierce competition with most of the many AI model providers. One of the primary applications they all point to is their platform's ability to build applications.

Think And Not Or

Rodrigo Sousa Coutinho, Co-Founder and AI Product Manager for OutSystems, sees the environment differently. "Before all this craziness with AI, our main competitor was traditional code," Coutinho explained. "Traditional code with AI typically doesn't have a lot of context, and this is something that we are bringing in to our Mentor."

Relating the tale of one of their customers, Countinho explained, "They work in OutSystems, and they work in traditional code, and they decided to give ChatGPT to all their developers. After a while, what they realized was that they had code nobody understood, and there were no people accountable for it, because ChatGPT is not accountable for code."

"The fact that we are using low-code avoids all of these issues because we are at the higher level of abstraction," he added, "we have much more control over what's generated. We ensure it follows the best practices, we ensure it's a valid application."

The solution, Coutinho believes, is some combination of low-code and AI—plus humans. "I'm a firm believer that the humans are a very important part of the equation. They will change their role, but they will not be 'thrown away.'"

Coutinho describes Mentor more as a communication tool that dispenses with development of the classic "functional spec" and goes straight to generating an application. To begin, he explains, you either type a prompt or upload a requirements document, and the system generates a fully functional application for you. The accuracy of the output depends on how much detail you provide—but the beauty is, you don't have to be overly specific at first. This is just the starting point of the process.

This is where the OutSystems Platform with Mentor really demonstrates its value as users don't have to have provided every detail of everything they want the application to do. They are always welcome to add to the application, remove parts of it, or create other changes. And yes, the best way to describe this way of building applications is definitely "agile."

"Mentor will help ensure that that the developers can show, or the citizen developer can show what's happening," Coutinho says. "Then the business will either say say, 'Yes, that's exactly it,' or perhaps it's not exactly right. But then they can iterate over and over. That's the role of Mentor."

When asked whether OutSystems is an LCAP with AI or an AI application generator with a low-code interface, Coutinho said, "OutSystems is the low code provider that uses AI. We are focused on that vision of allowing every company to innovate through software, and we're doing that through automation and low-code."