Retool is the proven application layer for deploying AI inside of enterprises, with AWS, Databricks, and others using Retool to rapidly deploy AI-enabled applications.
Retool, the leading application layer for AI, today announced that companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Databricks have already automated over 100 million hours of work using its platform. The company is also launching Agents, designed for developers to further automate human labor. Agents use LLMs for reasoning capabilities and Retool for taking action, ultimately accomplishing work autonomously. Additionally, Retool is introducing an industry-first capability: allowing developers to observe and manage Agents as they work, ensuring they are performing as intended and delivering business value.
The Missing ROI in AI is Automation
The AI industry is facing a massive return-on-investment problem. Despite all the capital poured into LLMs, companies have failed to convert these technical capabilities into business outcomes. In fact, there’s a staggering $500 billion gap between AI investments and value created so far. BCG's February 2025 survey found that only one-quarter of executives report their companies have created significant value from their AI initiatives.
LLMs are advanced, but chat has remained our primary interface for AI interaction. Very few applications allow companies to truly automate labor in a developer-first fashion. Retool is the platform that allows developers to automate labor at scale.
“Retool is trusted by the world’s largest companies to turn AI investments into real economic value at scale,” said Bryan Schreier of Sequoia Capital. “The platform’s universal data connectivity and native model support uniquely positions it as the essential application layer for AI.”
Retool Customers Already Automate Over 100 Million Hours of Work
Customers are already using Retool to build and deploy AI-powered apps and workflows that automate a wide range of business processes. The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, a global team that helps companies build and launch AI solutions, uses Retool as an application layer on top of AWS’s leading AI services.
"Retool enables us to efficiently implement our AI services and models, like Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon Nova, for our customers," said Sri Elaprolu, Director, AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. "We can more easily demonstrate to customers how to automate complex enterprise work and truly leverage AI in their organizations. Retool gives us – and our customers – a flexible, integrated, and easy-to-use application layer for deploying AI for almost any use case.”
“Our integration with Retool is a force multiplier," said Roger Murff, VP of Technology Partners at Databricks. "As enterprise demand for data intelligence grows, our partnership will leverage the benefits of Retool’s application layer and the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to help customers build domain-specific AI agents. This leads to agents that are smarter, more reliable, and can automate complex knowledge work and deliver measurable business outcomes across their organizations."
Developers Demand an Application Layer for AI
Developers face a significant challenge when building AI applications: the need to handle complex logic, integrate diverse data sources, and test and manage their apps at scale. This "heavy lifting" slows down deployment and diverts resources from innovation.
Retool’s trusted platform allows developers to build mission-critical tools that run businesses. The platform’s frontend capabilities, tool-building capabilities, universal data source integration, and native support for dynamic AI models uniquely position Retool to be the application layer for AI.
Unlike other solutions, Retool is:
- Open and connected: Customers can seamlessly integrate with corporate systems and data sources through Retool Workflows and queries
- Model agnostic: Choose the best LLM for each use case, optimizing performance and cost
- Tool centric: Leveraging the most specific and sophisticated tools, LLMs have far more context and become much smarter
- Multimodal: Developers can move between natural language, visual, code, and logical modalities–using the right tool for the right job
- Secure & flexible: Built with enterprise-grade security, robust agent governance, integrations with all databases and APIs, and scalable cloud and/or on-premise infrastructure
With the launch of Agents, developers have the tools for prompt management, testing, evaluation, and observability to ensure reliability–and deliver business outcomes across any industry.
“Software developers are the architects of the AI revolution,” said David Hsu, co-founder & CEO of Retool. “They deeply understand existing systems, databases, and APIs that form the foundation for these apps and flows. Retool helps developers to lead this transformation, ensuring that AI is implemented responsibly and at scale–ultimately, reshaping the future of work.”
Pay-by-the-Hour Pricing Reduces Agent Costs
Today, hundreds of new AI-enabled SaaS products are flooding the market, with businesses facing the escalating costs of AI vendor sprawl. Many are getting locked into expensive, off-the-shelf SaaS agents with rigid pricing models—be it fixed monthly fees, per-task charges, or other structures that may not align with actual usage or value.
To maximize customer value, Retool’s Agents are pay-by-the-hour. Customers only pay for their Agents while they're actively working, and the hourly rate is tiered based on the LLM used. This ensures that businesses can align AI costs directly with the sophistication of the tasks performed, optimizing their AI investments.
“Our pricing strategy for Agents is meant to be as symbolic as it is economic,” said Hsu, CEO of Retool. “We’re offering Agents that literally work at the speed of computers, and then pricing them far below a comparable human hourly wage to communicate the transformative economics of deploying AI within organizations. By making AI Agents affordable and accessible, we're helping businesses automate more tasks and capture maximum value from AI.”
Availability
Retool Agents is in public beta today. For more information, visit our blog and sign up https://retool.com/agents.
About Retool
Retool is the application layer for AI and leading platform for internal software development, trusted by over 10,000 companies worldwide, including Amazon, Stripe, Brex, and Orangetheory Fitness. Using Retool, developers deploy sophisticated apps and agents dramatically faster without sacrificing quality or control, combining powerful building blocks with the flexibility of custom code. The company’s model-agnostic approach lets teams select the optimal AI capabilities for each use case while maintaining enterprise-grade security and scalability. To learn more, visit https://retool.com.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250528644298/en/
Contacts
Riley Burns
riley@cmand.co
