The 2026 Forrester AppGen Landscape and the Future of App Development.
The way enterprises build software is being redrawn, and Forrester's Q2 2026 AppGen and Low-Code Platforms Landscape, published on 19 May 2026, captures a moment most CIOs already sense inside their own organizations. Application creation has moved beyond the exclusive work of professional developers, and the platforms enabling that change are the ones that will define enterprise IT for the rest of the decade.
Kissflow is in that landscape. Forrester named us among 40 vendors shaping how applications, workflows, and AI agents get built across enterprises. The report, authored by Ken Parmelee with Chris Gardner, Kylie Cadogan, and Kara Hartig, places AppGen and low-code at the center of five primary automation markets, identifying it as the category most directly responsible for putting application generation in the hands of citizen and professional developers at the same time.
A market that has stopped being theoretical
Forrester is unambiguous that businesses failing to rapidly develop agents and automate app creation will lose market share, and that description matches what is already happening across enterprise IT. Manufacturers, retailers, energy companies, and financial services firms have moved past the question of whether to do this and are now asking who they trust to do it with them.
The platforms that win that trust look different from the platforms that won the previous wave. The report notes that AI-native startups, despite their funding and momentum, do not bring the cohesive enterprise features the category demands, and that hyperscalers carry similar gaps in their own way. Production deployments expose what impressive demos hide, which is where security, governance, integration, and lifecycle management start to matter more than prompt quality.
This is the gap Kissflow has been built into. Our customers run production processes in industries where downtime, data lineage, and audit trails are not optional, including McDermott, Puma Energy, TotalEnergies, Motorola Solutions, and Lenskart. The verticals these companies operate in are the same verticals Forrester recorded as our primary industry focus: manufacturing and production of industrial products, natural resources and mining, and retail. We arrived at those verticals deliberately, because the operational complexity inside those industries is where low-code earns its keep.
The three bets we made public
Forrester gives every vendor in the landscape the chance to nominate the three extended use cases it wants the market to associate with its platform, and that selection forces a choice because no platform can credibly claim everything. We chose AI agent development, application monitoring and management, and task automation, and that choice describes what we think the next two years of enterprise development will demand.
AI agent development is the use case Forrester flags as nascent across most vendors in the landscape, and the assessment matches what we see in our own customer conversations. Many platforms can host an agent, but far fewer can develop, deploy, govern, and evolve one inside an enterprise process. Building agents is a discipline, and the platforms that treat it as one will own this category.
Application monitoring and management is the part of the conversation most vendors skip, because agents that cannot be observed, audited, and corrected will not survive the first quarterly review by a CIO. We have been investing in observability and governance because the work we see customers planning for 2027 and 2028 will not run without it.
Task automation sits underneath both of those, because the most ambitious agent eventually decomposes into tasks that must run reliably, repeatedly, and at low cost, and the agent strategy above depends entirely on whether that layer runs.
We did not choose front-end-only web apps or integration layer alone, because neither describes the work that gets a plant manager, a category buyer, or a refinery operations lead past the bottleneck they actually have.
What Forrester says comes next
The report closes with forecasts about where the AppGen and low-code market is heading next, and read in sequence, they describe the work our customers have already started asking us to do.
Generative tools will shift from building isolated apps to building full systems, including CRM-scale patterns and well-understood application workflows that today sit outside the capabilities of most platforms. Autonomous agents will increasingly be paired with private models, becoming intellectual property in their own right and a meaningful piece of how enterprises differentiate. More of the software development lifecycle will be handed over to agents, with humans taking on a verification role for documentation, test plans, bug fixes, and pipeline progression.
We are building for all three, and the question for the rest of 2026 and into 2027 is which platforms will get there with the enterprise features intact, because the gap between AI capability and enterprise plumbing is where this market will be decided.
Why this matters now
Being named in the Q2 2026 AppGen and Low-Code Platforms Landscape is meaningful because of what the landscape itself represents: an analyst firm with no incentive to be optimistic, mapping the shift in how enterprise software is built and confirming that it is now structural. AppGen and low-code is the category Forrester defines as the cohesive layer where citizen developers, professional developers, and AI agents converge to do the work the business actually needs done.
For the customers running their most operationally critical processes on Kissflow, the recognition is a piece of external validation for a bet they made on us long before this report existed. For the buyers evaluating platforms right now, the message is sharper because the field of vendors who can credibly build, govern, and evolve enterprise applications and agents is narrowing quickly. Forrester counted 40 vendors in the landscape today, and the number that will still be having serious conversations with Global 2000 enterprises in three years will be much smaller.
We intend to be one of them.
