Bust out of pilot purgatory with proprietary agentic platforms

CIOs and CTOs must decide between open and closed approaches to build and orchestrate AI agents.

The ambitious open route offers the potential long-term gains of a broad DIY ecosystem but comes with the risk of getting mired in pilot purgatory as you tackle the challenges of integration, security, privacy, and data work. Sign up for ‘closed’ and you get rapid deployment in proprietary platforms that handle those concerns for you—at the risk of a new vendor lock-in.

Workato is betting on a significant number of customers picking the pragmatic latter trade-off. At its recent Las Vegas WoW! event, Workato promised governed orchestration, compliance controls, and system-native agents embedded directly into ERP, CRM, HR, and finance. It’s an appealing, action-oriented way ahead for leaders who want trust and ROI fast.

Workato One Platform customers get from idea to production in two months

The Workato One platform deals with security, connects your data, and enables developers and business folks to fast-track agents to production with a library of around 1,000 quick-start use-case-focused agents that firms can hone to their specific needs. Customers validate going from ideation to production in two months.

Workato claims an 80 per cent hit rate in moving from pilot to production, tearing through the challenge of ‘pilot purgatory’ besetting much of the industry (and explored in our report Break Free From Pilot Purgatory). Workato’s platform tackles several security, data, and control issues that otherwise lead to pilot failure.

Almost nine in 10 enterprises need an AI confidence boost

It’s an approach that will serve the 88% of enterprises that HFS data reveals are still stuck in the AI slow lane—struggling with data, process, and governance debts (only 12 per cent of enterprises have cracked AI maturity).

The Workato platform offers enterprise confidence by placing KPIs front and center. It acknowledges the importance of control over key repeatable enterprise tasks built on the Workato team’s years of process experience. It breaks work into atomic enterprise elements—small, governed, reusable actions that can be compiled into the ‘how’ of enterprise workflows.

The fast track comes with the risk of constraints on the potential of your broader ecosystem

The strength of a trusted, closed loop (also offered in examples such as Salesforce’s AgentForce, WRITER, SAP Joule, and ServiceNow’s agentic provisions) delivers outcomes at pace, but risks constraining the broader potential of open, multi-agent collaboration across the enterprise stack. The leadership challenge is not just how to deploy agentic now, but how to do so without constraining a more open ecosystem that may define your future.

Short-term, risk-free rapid gain is going to sound tempting to many leaders, especially to the many CIOs and CTOs currently charged with delivering with urgency.

Workato would argue that its platform is not 100% closed loop, allowing the use of external agents with a focus on secure MCP servers and the Google-led A2A protocol. But when you sign up, you are making Workato your control tower.

The Bottom Line: Try agentic with a safety net for the confidence to move into production at pace.

Workato offers a route to operationalizing agentic AI with the rigor of enterprise process management: guardrails, KPIs, and outcome-driven pre-built solutions. The POC-to-production conversion rate and the atomic focus on enterprise needs are proving effective. CIOs and CTOs who need to make agentic gains fast should at least test and learn, taking advantage of a Workato sandbox you can stand up instantly.

Is Workato the only agentic solution you will need? Probably not. Can it give you a quick route to initial agentic business impact? Eighty-plus in-production customers suggest there’s a case for that.