You can hardly move these days for announcements about agents and agentic technology. With the topic currently cresting the “peak of inflated expectations” in Gartner’s hype cycle, it feels like the mood amongst enterprises is souring.
Fabian Veit, CEO of low-code and automation vendor Make, was keen to address this elephant in the room from the very outset of the company’s recent Waves 2025 event in Munich. Using humor, he acknowledged the fatigue around AI hype and provided a launchpad for a more practical discussion:
> “2025 was promised to be the year of the AI agents and the reason you can all be here today is because you understood that early. So you can now lean back and enjoy the day while your AI agents run the business without you. Oh wait… maybe not?”
The laughter that followed suggested a collective feeling of relief that we weren’t going to hear any overblown claims. The resulting enthusiasm showed that people didn’t just want to hear what was new — they wanted to hear what was real.
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### Seeing is Believing
Using this goodwill, Veit quickly pivoted from amusement to realism:
> “I’m sure that you have all felt the excitement around AI agents everywhere in the last year. Yet in many companies, the reality around using AI isn’t as rosy.”
He went on to note that this reality has led Gartner to place AI agents at the very top of the hype cycle. An informal show of hands confirmed that most attendees recognized the gap between promise and practice in their own organizations.
Veit’s message was clear: Make wants to help its customers cross that gap by applying the right balance of deterministic and agentic automation to the right kinds of problems.
> “Our goal at Make is to help you unlock fully automated business operations across your entire value chain, starting with very traditional automation and expanding into new forms of automation like AI.”
So far, this sounded like aspirational language that could have come from any vendor in the space. But what really set the tone for the day was how Veit framed the company’s distinct perspective:
> “Automation is powerful, but visibility is what really makes it scale.”
That line captured Make’s long-held philosophy that empowerment comes from the ability to see and understand the systems powering a business, whether at the point of creation or operation. This belief has driven Make’s highly visual approach since its founding and remains a guiding principle as Make extends that philosophy into new modalities discussed during the day’s sessions.
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### Visualization as a Shared Language
In Make’s worldview, visualization is no longer just a preferred modality for solution creation but a shared conceptual foundation for multi-modal collaboration between people and AI. This idea of visibility as the unifying thread across automation and AI was picked up by Anton Danilov, Make’s VP of Product.
He described the practical implementation of this strategy as *visual orchestration*:
> “We designed visual orchestration around three key pillars: how you build, how you accelerate, and how you scale.”
Each pillar represents a different stage in the journey, united by Make’s belief in visualization as a route to clarity. From an agentic perspective, this philosophy is now being extended to fuse automation and AI into a single visual language that spans all three pillars. This enables customers to use and visualize AI consistently — from design through to operations.
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### Visualization as Creation, Collaboration, and Coordination
While Danilov’s three pillars represent a lifecycle structure typical for a platform company, it became clear during the event that these features translate visualization into value for Make’s customers in three broader ways:
– **Visualization as a Medium for Creation**
– **Visualization as a Tool for Collaboration**
– **Visualization as a Method for Coordination**
These themes reflect how Make views the world — focusing on making solutions visual, intuitive, and transparent.
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### Visual-First Agent Development
Make hasn’t abandoned its visual-builder roots in pursuit of the latest AI trend. Instead, it’s folding AI agents into the same design language that has long defined its platform’s appeal.
Sven Mertens, Product Lead, described the new agent-building experience within Make’s existing visual Scenario Builder:
> “You can build your agents directly in the Scenario Builder. You can then see them work and gain understanding in real time, including how the agent reasons and which actions it takes.”
Visualization remains at the heart of the creative act within the Make platform. By embedding agent development inside the same canvas, the company ensures AI is an extension of the approach already valued by its customers.
More broadly, integrating the agent control plane into the platform — where the platform, rather than individual large language models (LLMs), acts as the nexus of agent control and governance — aligns with wider industry trends.
With its visual-first philosophy, Make ensures this integration remains visible and understandable across every automation and asset it hosts.
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### Sharing and Scaling Agents
Building and scaling agents can be difficult without prior templates. To address this, Make is enabling easy sharing and reuse of agents, along with a growing library of ready-made ‘standard’ agents that customers can adapt and extend.
This pragmatic model lowers the barrier to experimentation while keeping all agent activity within a governed, visual environment.
At the core, Make continues to treat visual models as the foundation of creation, with agents simply becoming an additional layer in its visual toolkit — a natural extension of principles that have guided the platform from the start.
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### Visualization as Collaboration
If visual tools have long been central to Make’s approach for solution creation, then the rapid rise of natural language interfaces could have been perceived as a threat. Instead, CTO and co-founder Patrik Šimek showed how Make’s new platform agent, MAIA, uses visual models to create a shared conceptual space, improving understanding between people and agents.
Šimek explained:
> “Every step of the way, we ask ourselves: how can we make building in Make more convenient, more visual, and more fun?”
Inspired by the “magical” feeling of vibe coding tools that convert natural language into code, Šimek wanted to deliver the same magic without sacrificing safety or scalability:
> “It feels magical but at the same time a bit intimidating. Is the code safe? Will it scale? What if something stops working? You already know that solutions in Make are scalable, secure, and reliable, but imagine co-creating them with a partner who truly understands you. MAIA is your personal buddy enabling you to build automations or AI solutions from end to end — all through natural language.”
Crucially, Šimek ties this back to Make’s foundational belief in the power of shared visualizations even in an increasingly conversational world:
> “And all this comes with something essential to me — full visual transparency. You always see what’s happening, so you always stay in control.”
This contrasts the often opaque outputs of natural-language coding tools with Make’s inherently transparent platform. Make’s opinionated architecture and shared visual language provide a structured framework that anchors conversational interactions in concrete concepts, enabling their effects to be visualized and evaluated at every step.
From this perspective, shared visualizations become a way to make natural-language conversations more concrete and understandable, transforming the platform’s visual language from a tool for faster individual creation into a shared conceptual model for safe, transparent AI co-creation.
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### Visualization as Coordination at Scale
Beyond the agent builder and conversational agent, another striking theme emerged at the event — the shift of visibility focus from the micro to the macro level.
German Bernhart, Principal Product Manager at Make, outlined the challenge organizations face as they scale:
> “It’s not just about building automations faster. It’s about keeping sight of how they all connect, so you can maintain enterprise-scale coordination over the rapidly escalating complexity of the overall landscape.”
Incredible things are being built with Make, not just scenarios, but entire landscapes containing hundreds of scenarios and connected systems. As these landscapes grow, understanding the big picture and dependencies becomes increasingly difficult.
To prevent this from becoming a black box, Make invested heavily in visibility at scale.
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### Introducing Make Grid: Enterprise-Wide Coordination
Announced last year in closed beta and now fully released, **Make Grid** is the company’s answer to scaling visual logic beyond individual scenarios and AI-augmented conversations into enterprise-wide coordination.
Bernhart describes Grid as:
> “An auto-generated, interactive map of the entire automation landscape — a tool that unites traditional workflows, AI-powered automations, and AI agents into a single visual model.”
With visibility comes simplicity:
> “If you can see it, it’s much easier to understand it and scale it further. You don’t have to worry about breaking something when making a change because you can see all the dependencies. That also helps you collaborate and align with management or clients.”
Based on a city planning metaphor, Grid auto-generates a real-time, living map of automation across the enterprise. Related workflows are grouped into ‘districts’ that mirror business domains. Each district visualizes dependencies between processes, agents, and underlying systems, allowing users to zoom out for a panoramic view or zoom in for granular details.
Multiple layers can be toggled on or off, helping users focus on specific system dependencies, business areas, data flows, or security concerns.
During the closed beta phase, enthusiastic testers submitted numerous ideas, signaling strong customer interest.
One CIO described Grid as:
> “The missing layer — the moment when I could finally scale low-code with confidence because I could see what was really going on.”
Other users praised it as a governance tool that helps optimize IT estates — from credit consumption to portfolio planning — without introducing bottlenecks that slow down teams.
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### Closing the Loop with Visibility, Governance, and Control
Anastasi Horňáková, Head of Product for Scalability, used Grid to close the loop on Fabian Veit’s opening statement that true scale demands visibility:
> “Scaling starts with a foundation of trust. You need visibility, you need governance, and you need control. That’s what Grid delivers.”
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### My Take
Make appears to be thriving under the ownership of process mining vendor Celonis following its acquisition in 2020. The impressions from the Waves 2025 event in Munich were clear: a noisy and enthusiastic community, growing enterprise confidence in the platform, and a cohesive vision centered on visualization as a path to speed and safety through understanding.
All announcements stayed true to that founding vision but extended it in exciting new ways: visual creation of agents, human-AI collaboration grounded in visual models, and enterprise-scale coordination through comprehensive visibility.
Many of the news items were solid but expected — an agent studio, platform agent, multiparty collaboration (MCP) support — the kind of developments that keep Make moving with the market.
But **Make Grid** stood out as both unexpected and unique. The deceptively simple idea of a topological automation landscape transforms Make from a straightforward low-code platform into an enterprise-scale coordination platform.
This new platform can help organizations resolve the long-standing tension between bottom-up innovation and top-down oversight.
While I, as a strategy and operating model enthusiast, immediately saw Grid’s strategic power, the company’s appreciation for the 2,000 community members who enthusiastically joined the closed beta suggests this kind of visibility has much wider appeal.
Grid didn’t feel like anything I’d seen before: visual, playful, vital, and powerful.
**Visualization as grand-scale coordination** — a new kind of strategic lens enabling organizations to better understand themselves.
Make’s founding philosophy crystallized in this moment: *seeing is understanding*, and understanding makes anything possible.
https://diginomica.com/automation-vendor-make-visual-orchestration-managing-ai-agents-enterprise