OutSystems, the Lisbon-founded low-code unicorn, has released its 2026 State of AI Development report — and the numbers reframe how Nordic enterprise software leaders should think about the year ahead. Based on a commissioned third-party survey of nearly 1,900 IT leaders globally conducted between December 2025 and January 2026, the report shows that 96% of organisations already use AI agents in some capacity, 97% are exploring system-wide agentic AI strategies, and just under half — 49% — describe their agentic capabilities as advanced or expert. That is the boom line. The correction line is sharper: 94% of organisations say AI sprawl is now increasing complexity, technical debt, and security risk.
The report dropped on April 7, alongside the US market launch of OutSystems’ Agentic Systems Engineering platform, announced on April 2. Taken together, they mark a moment: a Portuguese company is now setting the enterprise agenda that Nordic banks, insurers, industrials and public-sector CIOs will spend the next two budget cycles reacting to.
Why this lands in the Nordics
OutSystems is not a new name in Scandinavia. The company counts enterprise customers across Sweden, Denmark and Norway through a partner network that includes Blue Screen (active in 11 countries including Sweden and Denmark), Devoteam Nordics, and regional systems integrators that have built delivery practices around the OutSystems platform. Major Nordic banks, insurers and public-sector programmes already run mission-critical apps on it. But the shift from low-code application development to governed agentic systems changes the conversation from tooling to architecture — and architecture is a CIO decision, not a developer one.
The 94% sprawl number is the one Nordic IT leaders will underline. 38% of organisations report mixing custom-built and pre-built agents, creating stacks that are difficult to standardise, secure or audit. Only 12% have implemented a centralised platform to manage that sprawl. In regulated sectors — which in the Nordics means most of the economy, from DNB and Nordea in banking to If P&C and Tryg in insurance, from Vattenfall and Fortum in energy to the region’s national digital-health backbones — that gap is not tolerable. Agent sprawl is becoming the new shadow IT, and it is arriving faster than most governance frameworks can handle.
What OutSystems is actually shipping
Agentic Systems Engineering, announced by OutSystems on April 2, pairs two components. The first is the OutSystems Enterprise Context Graph, which gives agents a shared, versioned understanding of the organisation’s data, APIs, and business rules so they can operate safely across systems. The second is a next-generation Mentor, which embeds AI assistance across the development lifecycle and connects with external tools including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Cursor. Together, OutSystems argues, they let engineering teams contribute alongside heterogeneous agents while enforcing compliance and production-readiness from the platform, not from human review. An early access programme is scheduled for Q2 2026.
For a Nordic CIO staring down procurement paperwork from five different agent vendors, the value proposition is governance rather than novelty. The bet OutSystems is making — and will ask Scandinavian customers to validate over the next 18 months — is that large organisations prefer a single governed platform to a sprawl of point solutions.
The Direction B angle that matters
OutSystems’ February launch of its Elevate partner platform explicitly ties partner rewards to AI credentials, delivery outcomes and customer satisfaction, with vertical specialisation in banking, insurance and healthcare. The programme will upskill partners in agentic AI with targeted enablement, which in practice means the Nordic regional partners training the bodies that will sit inside DNB, Nordea, Handelsbanken, If, Tryg, Helsana-equivalents and Nordic hospital groups. The knock-on effect is a Portuguese enterprise software stack quietly becoming a default layer inside Nordic critical infrastructure.
That is a different kind of Portuguese export success than offshore wind or green ammonia. It does not move megawatts or container volumes. But it reshapes the hiring pipeline, the integrator economy, and the AI procurement logic of entire Nordic sectors. OutSystems’ Goncalo Gaiolas, Chief Product Officer, has publicly framed agentic engineering as the difference between demos and production. For Nordic CIOs currently building AI roadmaps around a patchwork of OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft Copilot and vertical SaaS agents, the Portuguese pitch is structural: the platform, not the agent, is the governance unit.
What Nordic buyers should actually do
Three immediate things. First, read the sprawl number as a procurement signal — if your organisation is among the 38% mixing custom and pre-built agents with no shared context graph, assume an audit trail problem is already forming. Second, evaluate Agentic Systems Engineering against the three or four other enterprise-grade governed agent platforms in the market (Salesforce Agentforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft’s Copilot Studio and a handful of narrower players) on the dimensions that matter in the Nordics: data residency in the EU, strong audit trails, IAM integration with Nordic identity stacks, and the ability to operate in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish where customer-facing agents need it. Third, engage the partner ecosystem early: the Elevate programme’s vertical enablement means certified Nordic partners will be the practical delivery path.
And the underlying story for this publication: OutSystems is not a Nordic vendor, but its Lisbon headquarters is now effectively setting the reference architecture that a large part of the Nordic enterprise AI market will measure itself against in 2026 and 2027. That is what a Portuguese scale-up winning in the Nordics looks like when the product is governance rather than hardware.