João Brandão of OutSystems, release engineering director, joins Chainguard Assemble 2026 for a conversation on artificial intelligence development platforms, agentic applications, continuous integration and continuous delivery and supply chain security. Brandão describes OutSystems' positioning as an AI development platform and explains how the company integrates Chainguard to secure base and third-party container images. They analyze CI/CD pipeline improvements, deployment metrics and developer workflows and consider implications for enterprise software teams.
Hosts Rebecca Knight and Paul Nashawaty of theCUBE Research lead the session. Nashawaty frames 2026 as the year of implementation and emphasizes security guardrails, responsible AI practices and investment in junior developer skill development.
Key takeaways include Brandão emphasizing OutSystems' efforts to reduce common vulnerabilities and exposures and secure images through Chainguard. They call for the evolution of platform engineering toward agentic models that couple agents with existing automation. Nashawaty underscores the need for actionable security guardrails, responsible AI governance and a stronger focus on junior developer training.
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João Brandão, OutSystems
João Brandão of OutSystems, release engineering director, joins Chainguard Assemble 2026 for a conversation on artificial intelligence development platforms, agentic applications, continuous integration and continuous delivery and supply chain security. Brandão describes OutSystems' positioning as an AI development platform and explains how the company integrates Chainguard to secure base and third-party container images. They analyze CI/CD pipeline improvements, deployment metrics and developer workflows and consider implications for enterprise software teams.
Hosts Rebecca Knight and Paul Nashawaty of theCUBE Research lead the session. Nashawaty frames 2026 as the year of implementation and emphasizes security guardrails, responsible AI practices and investment in junior developer skill development.
Key takeaways include Brandão emphasizing OutSystems' efforts to reduce common vulnerabilities and exposures and secure images through Chainguard. They call for the evolution of platform engineering toward agentic models that couple agents with existing automation. Nashawaty underscores the need for actionable security guardrails, responsible AI governance and a stronger focus on junior developer training.
Practice Lead and Principal AnalysttheCUBE Research
HOST
Rebecca Knight
HostSiliconANGLE Media
HOST
In this interview from Chainguard Assemble 2026 in New York City, João Brandão, director of engineering at OutSystems, joins theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and theCUBE Research's Paul Nashawaty to discuss how the shift from software scarcity to software abundance is reshaping platform engineering and developer workflows. Brandão explains how OutSystems is evolving into an AI development platform that helps enterprises build not just web and mobile apps but also agentic applications to bridge the gap between AI hype and enterprise reality. He highlights the company'...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What does OutSystems do in the AI era, and how does OutSystems work with Chainguard?add
When did the shift from software scarcity to software abundance start becoming noticeable in day-to-day work, and how is that changing developer workflows and platform engineering?add
What is the current state of your deployment process, what challenges—especially around deployment failures—remain to be addressed, and how could AI/agentic tools help?add
>> Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Chainguard Assemble here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight alongside Paul Nashawaty, principal analyst. I would like to welcome to the show João Brandão, release engineering director at OutSystems. Welcome, João.
João Brandão
>> Thank you. Thank you.
Rebecca Knight
>> Yeah, direct from Lisbon.
João Brandão
>> Exactly.
Rebecca Knight
>> Yeah.
João Brandão
>> Thank you.
Rebecca Knight
>> For those who are less familiar with OutSystems, tell our viewers a little bit about what you do there and what the company is about and how you work with Chainguard too.
João Brandão
>> Yeah. Okay. OutSystems builds an AI development platform. So our business, our goal is to help customers simplify the way they develop software, and now in the new AI era, to build not only apps and mobile and web apps, but also agents. So that's what we do. And we believe that we are... We can help on solving the gap between the AI app hype, let's say, and the enterprise reality, because we have a lot of enterprise customers. So they rely on our platform to build mission-critical applications. And now that we can also build agents and help customers creating agentic apps with our platform. So we believe that they can solve that unpredictability that agents and AI brings to the enterprise. So that's pretty much... Well, regarding Chainguard, we use Chainguard for... We have a cloud native platform. So we use Chainguard for base and third party images. So we ingest and we reduce a lot of our CVEs based on that. So that's pretty much the goal.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah. Our system was really very cool at empowering the citizen developers before it was cool to empower citizen developers. So now you have the ability to have AI involved in the process and allowing it... It's a big shift. It's a big shift for a lot of organizations. It's a big shift for a mind shift from the developer perspective, because developers or builders, however you want to frame it. Whether they're professional or citizen developers, it's a big shift there. It's a big shift for organizations. They have to look at things and understand compliance, regulations, and governance as part of it. Are you seeing this? And especially with regards to Chainguard and some of the announcements that we saw today, are you using any of the new announcements that were put from the keynote?
João Brandão
>> We're actually looking into the new announcement and seeing how... I already sent a lot of stuff to my teams.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Okay.
João Brandão
>> Yeah, but for sure, there's a lot of interesting stuff there, especially the skills product because, well, internally we're doing that move to become much more agentic in the way we build our own software, right? So we're building a framework that accelerates the way we build our internal software, our software. And so yeah, those security guardrails, this is really a critical thing, right? We accelerate a lot, so we need to understand how can we cope with that speed without putting at risk our business. So that's really critical.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah.
Rebecca Knight
>> One of the things we're talking a lot about here at Assemble is this shift from going software scarcity to software abundance, where the bottleneck is no longer having to write the code, it's managing everything else that comes with it. When did you start noticing that shift taking place day to day and how is that changing your workflow?
João Brandão
>> Okay. Well, I think last year, we started seeing that a lot. So we start seeing that AI movement was coming, right? A lot with agents. So I think it was the agent's year, let's say. That's pretty much when we felt that we need to do that shift and start looking much more on how we can embrace the AI era internally, and not only internally, because also our platform is becoming an AI development platform. So it's pretty much both ways, internally and externally, let's say.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah. No, that's a fair statement. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. I usually say it in a way that says basically 2025 was the year of experimentation and innovation, trying to figure stuff out, building agents, using MCP servers, building applications, figuring out how AI is going to impact your business. 2026 is the year of implementation. This is the year that people are going to say, "Okay, we invested money, we invested time, how do we take that and move forward?"
And when we look at that, I'd love to get your perspective from how AI impacts a developer workflows and platform engineering because what we see in our research is we see software and code has to be released very rapidly. So the tune of 24% of organizations want to release code on an hourly basis, yet only 8% are able to do so. And that seems to be quite aggressive, but you can do that if you have an optimized CICD pipeline and SDLC. What are your thoughts?
João Brandão
>> I need to improve a lot. In terms of platform engineering, which is pretty much my space, I see that our internal systems, they need to evolve to become more agentic. Maybe there will be two... Of course, this is how we are seeing this, but of course it can change because-
Paul Nashawaty
>> Sure....
João Brandão
>> this is changing so fast, but maybe in two motions. So one is, okay, with the systems that we have, how can we transform them to become agentic? Maybe a second motion will be more native agentic, let's say. Maybe one idea would be that, okay, we have our automations. I'm talking about CICD, for instance. And then we couple some agents behind it that will interact with that big piece of automation that we have on top. Maybe the next topic could be we have an agent orchestrator becoming the main system or something similar. So I think maybe we'll see that transformation. We are still on the first stage of that. I think that's really important to accelerate because just to giving an example, deployment failures, this is something that we have. We have really pretty good doormetrics at this point. So we are elite in most of them. We deploy in production less than 24 hours. We deploy more than thousand times a month, which is pretty much 40 something a day with the change failure rate of less than 5%. So we are pretty much in a good shape, I would say. But as you're saying, I think this will probably be not enough in the short term, midterm, short term. So we need to do this evolution. Deployment failures, for instance, is a good example because it takes a lot of time for developers to understand exactly why it failed. And sometimes you don't solve root causes really fast because, well, maybe the next version will go in and that's it. And then the teams will not really go deeper and understand exactly what happened. But I think as we move to become really fast, we need to be really fast also understanding what were the problems and how to fix them. And I think AI, of course, in the agents, in the agentic transformation will help a lot in this transformation. This one on the platform engineering side, of course, on developer's side, this is a huge transformation.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Absolutely.
João Brandão
>> I don't know if you want to touch that side also.
Paul Nashawaty
>> No, I agree with you. I think that it's an evolution across organizations. And again, it depends on the maturity of those organizations and how they're implementing their different tech stacks and whether they're modernizing their tech stacks as they're moving forward. I definitely agree with the approach that you're referring to here.
Rebecca Knight
>> That gets us into this next element that I want to ask you about, and that is jobs. We know that AI is changing jobs, how we work, where we work, what we're doing when we work. What does it change about the skills that you're hiring for? When developers are not writing every line of code, they're often orchestrating everything that goes around it. So how does that change what skills you're hiring for, but also the skills that you're asking of your team today?
João Brandão
>> Yeah. Well, it's an awesome point. I think we're still discovering a lot what we need to change to cope with this new reality. I would say that one of the most concerning topics for me, it's really how do we ensure that junior devs will have the skills to review AI code, and they can really grow, and how can we help them to grow? And I think this is crucial for our industry, because if we don't have, and we don't hire junior devs, we won't have devs, right?
Paul Nashawaty
>> Absolutely.
João Brandão
>> So how do we fix it?
Rebecca Knight
>> What's the future? Right.
João Brandão
>> What's the future? To be honest, we are still learning on this. Actually, I had a really interesting presentation and conversation with our people team because this also touches a lot of human resources, right? So how do we solve this problem? I think also Anthropic is very concerned.
Rebecca Knight
>> Absolutely. Yes.
João Brandão
>> They shared a tech note on that and the research. They're doing a lot of research and that shows the impact on the growth. I think we'll need to learn. A lot of this, at least for me, we are still learning and see how we can help. And of course, all that transformation, I think in our company, we're seeing that developers in the future, it's becoming more maybe a role, not really a profile, let's say, because I think a lot of different roles, different people will be developing or may develop, right? In the future, maybe UXers will start developing much more. Maybe PMs, they will start developing. We need to understand exactly what will be the impact, but for sure, it's a huge transformation that is coming in. I think we're seeing the wave.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah. I think that's a very important point. I want to double click down on it because I think it's a point we just said I don't want to gloss over, which is the fact that many organizations are looking to use AI to replace junior developers. That's an incredible point here because think about it, I mean, we all had this rite of passage to get to where we are and we learned along the way.
João Brandão
>> Absolutely.
Paul Nashawaty
>> And to your point that you have to train up a junior developer to become a senior developer. So in the next three to five years when organizations are looking for senior developers, who are they going to go to?
João Brandão
>> Absolutely.
Paul Nashawaty
>> AI get it that we'll have advanced AI. And I guess my next question would be, from an out systems perspective is, what are you learning about using AI in software development? I mean, there's an impact here, but there's also... I think it's a responsible AI that has to be put into play. What are your thoughts?
João Brandão
>> Yeah, yeah. True, true. We are building a lot of documentation, a lot of things with building on top of the tools that we have today available, like Claude Code or Copilot. So we're building a lot of those skills in order to improve the way we build our software. But absolutely, we need to understand the best practices in order to use AI, in order to not impact negatively in the future, not only what we push through the pipeline to production, but also how can we help our teams to grow and to learn how to use AI properly. So that's pretty much what I think at this point. So no really concrete actions because I think we are still learning a lot.
Paul Nashawaty
>> Yeah. It shows this is something that we all have to be thinking about. That's what it shows.
João Brandão
>> Yeah, yeah. And to your point, what you're saying before, I think that the best way to learn is to feel the pain in a very controlled way, let's say, not too much, otherwise, we may be out of our possibilities, but it's important to fill the difficulties, right? And if AI brings everything and we don't have that critical mindset, curiosity to understand how things work, I think that will be a big problem because we cannot grow.
Rebecca Knight
>> And you're watching children using AI to help with their math homework or write their-
João Brandão
>> I'm very concerned-...
Rebecca Knight
>> English essays and if all that cognitive offloading. They don't ever feel the discomfort of an empty page or a math problem that they need to really wrestle with. It is concerning.
João Brandão
>> Absolutely. Absolutely.
Rebecca Knight
>> Well, João, I really respect your insights there. So thank you so much for coming on the show. A really interesting conversation.
João Brandão
>> Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah. Thank you.
Rebecca Knight
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Nashawaty. Stay tuned for more of The Cube's coverage of Chainguard Assemble. You're watching The Cube, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.
