Why We Built Workato Genies (and Why You Should Start With Them)
If you’ve ever sat down to build an agent from scratch, you know the feeling. Blank page. Too many ideas. Endless “what if” debates. Before long, you’re in what I like to call paralysis by analysis. Everyone’s excited about AI, but no one’s actually shipping anything.
That’s the reality we saw with a lot of teams, including ours. Building an agent that works in the real world isn’t just about throwing some prompts into Agent Studio. You need to know which problem is worth solving. You need best practices for how to design it. And you need functional expertise so it doesn’t just look good in a demo but actually gets used day to day.
That’s why we built Workato Genies.
Genies are production-ready agents designed to get you past the blank page and into value, fast. Instead of spending months figuring out best practices, you start with something that works, then make it your own. At this year’s Workato’s WOW Conference, I had the chance to share more about them.
See the complete session here
What makes a Genie a Genie?
We put some guardrails around what it means to be a Genie. They have to be:
- Production ready: You can test and iterate from day one, not after six months of build time.
- Built on real expertise: Both functional domain know-how and agentic best practices go into every Genie.
- ROI driven: Each has clear goals and KPIs so you’re measuring impact, not just activity.
- Extensible: Need to tweak a skill or add a new one? You can.
- Enterprise grade: Security and compliance aren’t optional add-ons. They’re baked in.
We took what we learned from 80+ customer projects and distilled it into agents that actually work. Not just prototypes, not just demos, but tools that get used.
Meet the current lineup
We started where the pain was loudest: sales, IT, and support.
Sales Genie
This one’s popular for obvious reasons. It partners with AEs on call prep, follow-ups, CRM enrichment, CPQ, account research, coaching, and forecasting. The real magic isn’t any single feature: it’s how they play together. When a rep preps for a call, account intelligence shows up in context. Coaching flows naturally from call analysis. Follow-ups turn into clear, prioritized actions. It feels less like a tool and more like a partner.
IT Genie
Built for internal IT teams. It doesn’t just “know” IT processes, it executes them: access requests, endpoint management, ticket workflows, and deflection. That means fewer queues, faster responses, and a better employee experience without burning out IT.
Support Genie
If you run a support org, you know the pressure: high volume, tight SLAs, and a backlog that never goes away. Support Genie deflects cases with accurate self-service and gives agents richer context, suggested next steps, and analytics so they can close faster. Customers get better answers, agents get a sidekick.
And in preview, we’re working on Marketing, HR and Recruiting, Customer Success, and Security Genies. Each one follows the same playbook: production-ready, extensible, and enterprise-grade.
What we learned as Customer Zero
Before we shipped Genies to anyone, we made ourselves the test case. Our BT team started with IT Genie. It took months of trial and error. They didn’t know what skills to build, how to prompt, or how to measure success. Painful.
Then they tried Sales Genie with the packaged blueprint. And suddenly it took weeks, not months. The difference was night and day. Instead of staring at a blank screen, they started with a reference architecture and best practices built from real customer use cases.
That was the “aha” moment: starting with a Genie doesn’t just save time. It accelerates adoption, because you’re not reinventing the wheel.
Fast forward: they’ve got 30+ Genies in the pipeline now. Some live, some still being tested. But the pattern holds. Start with a Genie, customize what you need, and keep iterating.
Adoption: the real challenge
Building the tech is one thing. Getting people to use it? That’s the hard part.
Here’s what we learned the hard way:
- Teach the Genie mindset. Bots are predictable, click a button, get a result. Genies are more open-ended. Users need to learn how to ask, act, and let the Genie push signals to them.
- Proactive wins. When the Genie tells an AE, “Here are your top three priorities for today,” it gets adopted. When it waits passively, it gets ignored.
- Personalization matters. Sales teams want emails in their own voice. Regions want their own nuances. We’ve added ways to handle this, and we’re working on even deeper personalization.
- Governance keeps you sane. Our GEARS framework (Govern, Enable, Adopt, Run, Skill) helps teams set policies, test properly, and make sure Genies are ready for production.
The tech works. Adoption is about design, training, and trust.
Where to start (my advice)
Don’t overthink it. Don’t start from scratch. Pick the Genie closest to your biggest use case: Sales, IT, or Support. Deploy it. Plug in your systems. Run a pilot.
In three weeks, you’ll have live signals and real feedback. Then you can extend it with your own skills and tweaks. That’s how you build momentum.
Closing thought
I said this on stage at WoW, and I’ll say it again here: the win isn’t the shiny demo. It’s proving value quickly and showing your teams that agents can be trusted partners.
Genies aren’t the finish line, they’re the starting block. They give you the fastest path from “idea” to “impact.”
