How Low-Code and Agentic AI propel innovation

Facing multiple pressures, including an urgent need to modernise legacy systems, talent shortages and regulatory compliance deadlines, enterprises cannot afford to spend months on developing new applications. Low-code development has been a game-changer, slashing huge chunks of development time to allow businesses to build better solutions in a quick time, while maintaining the required level of governance. Now Agentic AI is entering the scene to take software development to a new level, enabling organisations to build intelligent systems and scale innovation across the enterprise.

The power of two

Offering visual, drag-and-drop tools, low-code platforms have turned business users into citizen developers; however, they also serve professional developers by speeding up basic code creation to free up time for complex assignments. Agentic AI adds autonomous, goal-driven intelligence to elevate efficient, but static apps into dynamic, self-optimising systems that constantly learn and adjust to changing requirements. It’s like a natural partnership, with low-code providing a foundation of scalable platforms to rapidly build and test applications that agentic AI endows with dynamism and adaptiveness. Enterprises adopting low-code plus agentic AI can respond to their environment with speed and intelligence and to new opportunities with agile innovation, as elaborated below:

Streamline development to support continuous innovation

Organisations can provide low-code platforms to professional and citizen developers to quickly build, test, refine and launch applications, while devolving routine coding, code snippet generation, debugging, and various testing activities to AI agents; agents also collaborate with developers, flagging issues, offering suggestions and taking actions to iteratively refine applications. Supported in this manner, developer teams can concentrate on solving complex problems and enable ongoing innovation.

Stretch capacity to scale innovation

Shortage of technical talent is projected to cost organisations USD 5.5 trillion by this year. Forecasts like these don’t augur well for enterprises, many of which struggle to scale innovation. However, low-code platforms can mitigate this crisis somewhat by simplifying routine coding tasks to free up development capacity; agentic AI contributes further by monitoring and streamlining development processes at scale.

AI agents analyse vast datasets to identify improvement opportunities and implement changes autonomously. With more time to spare, tech teams can work alongside the business to generate new ideas. All this together helps to scale innovation.

Democratise development to make innovation accessible

The biggest impact of low-code platforms is that they empower non-technical business users to build software solutions meeting specific needs, on their own. AI agents make development even more accessible by allowing citizen developers to instruct them in natural language to create reports, automate workflows, build simple applications, etc.

Creating value across the board

The combination of low-code and agentic AI platforms delivers significant benefits across domains. In data analysis and reporting operations, a low-code platform can be used to build an interface to connect to various data sources and visually represent information, while AI agents can be leveraged to process large datasets into insights, create reports and even recommend actions. IT and DevOps teams can design common workflows on a low-code platform, leaving autonomous agents to handle code generation, testing, bug identification, CI/CD monitoring and proactive threat hunting. Brand managers can design drag-and-drop interfaces for various marketing applications using low-code development, and deploy agents to personalise advertising campaigns, write product descriptions, and even create visual assets based on specific inputs and branding guidelines.

The above is just a sample of the immense value potential of low-code plus agentic AI. Low-code puts the power of development in the hands of every user; agentic AI hands them means to build better, smarter solutions. Hence, organisations in every industry should look at adopting these technologies to innovate efficient, intelligent and self-optimising solutions that don’t just perform tasks but can also understand context, adapt to change, make smart decisions and take impactful actions.

Authored by Shishank Gupta, SVP & Head of the Digital Workplace Ecosystem and Microsoft Practice at Infosys