Who are the AI innovators at your company? For many, the easy answer is the developers.
Software engineers have quickly learned their way around coding assistants and agent frameworks, and what they accomplish with these tools is setting the pace for the rest of the company.
The going isn’t always easy for these trailblazers. Every AI team faces two realities:
- Enterprise context is difficult. Your data lives in dozens of systems with tight security. If your agents can’t access that context safely, they hallucinate, and they lose trust.
- Agents need agency. Real value happens when agents have the framework to do things like reconciling transactions, processing reports, or initiating process workflows.
Workato sits at a critical intersection in this road. It connects the right data with the right guardrails, then gives agents the power to act. Whatever your path into AI, Workato brings the enterprise context and trusted actions to get your prototypes into production.
Bridging a false divide inside IT
We often see two camps: a business systems team orchestrating processes with Workato, and a machine learning or programming team hand-coding agents. It can feel like a choice. It isn’t.
The opportunity: bring them together. Let developers keep their preferred tools while Workato supplies the enterprise context, security, observability, and action layer that moves projects across the finish line.
3 ways to build with AI and Workato
Here are three ways you can find a way forward together, with Workato providing the enterprise context and trusted skills.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
MCP is a clean way to expose your APIs, systems, and data to LLMs, so assistants and agents have a secure and guardrailed entry point they can access to answer questions or take pre-defined actions.
Where Workato fits: we connect to the systems your business runs on and enforce the permissions your security team expects. Workato’s Enterprise MCP helps agents find the right data while staying compliant.
Learn more about Workato Enterprise MCP.
AI Coding, also known as “vibe coding”
Tell your coding assistant what you want to do, and almost immediately get an application that does just that—voila! Tools like Claude, Cursor, and Replit enable “vibe coding,” an approach that’s redefining software development by making it possible to build apps without touching a single line of code.
Where Workato fits: no matter your approach, your app still needs enterprise context and safe actions. Workato is the bedrock that lets your app read the right data, call the right systems, and ship faster.
Hear how Gonzaga University laid the foundation for AI.
Managed Agent Runtimes
Many engineers prefer starting with open-source libraries and writing agents in Python or TypeScript. You keep full control of logic and lifecycle, and you can build directly on proven frameworks.
Where Workato fits: use Workato to give your custom agents trusted skills: audited, rate-limited, and policy-aware actions that execute real business workflows. Combine that with our connectors and governance to move from “cool demo” to “in production.”
Learn more about trusted skills from the WOW 2025 keynotes.
The Workato AI Research Lab in San Francisco
Wherever and however you build with AI, Workato will meet you there and make it magical.
Workato was built by developers and is obsessed with making developers, and the teams they partner with, effective, which is why we’ve opened the Workato AI Research Lab in Dogpatch, San Francisco.
The lab is a place where our researchers, product engineers, and developer community can get guidance from each other in this uncharted territory we’re in. Our goal is to go deeper than ChatGPT wrappers and API calls, to encode agent behaviors into model weights rather than just lines and pages of prompts.
The lab is composed of an experienced group of developers with expertise in:
- Model post-training and continuous fine-tuning
- Synthetic data generation
- Automated evaluations (evals), which are critical because most agent projects lack robust, repeatable evals
So what can you expect from the Workato AI Research Lab? Think tools that help you iterate safely: automated evals, continuous improvement loops, and models optimized for your use cases.
AI is opening new doors for developers, but the true progress happens when we connect that innovation to enterprise context and trusted action. That’s where you and Workato can shine together.
We can’t wait to build with you. For more, check out my full keynote at World of Workato: