How Retool built robust Workflow and Agents products on Temporal

The customer

Retool empowers teams to build internal tools rapidly by combining a low-code builder with a developer-friendly experience. Their platform recently expanded with Agents: a powerful new capability that enables customers to build, monitor, and deploy intelligent agents powered by LLMs.

With Temporal, the Agents team moved faster and launched with confidence, without heavy operational overhead.

The challenge

When Retool set out to build Agents, the engineering team was venturing into a new product domain: one that demanded real-time responsiveness, highly reliable orchestration for LLM-powered tools, and rapid development to stay competitive. They needed an infrastructure that would support:

• Event-driven, multi-step tasks with LLMs in the loop

• Context sharing across iterative agent runs

• Fine-grained control over retries, timeouts, and external calls

• Seamless scaling without operational overhead

The team knew from experience that building a durable, production-grade orchestration layer in-house would be a massive lift, and they didn’t want to compromise on reliability.

The solution

Retool turned to Temporal Cloud to power Agents from day one. They made this decision cross-functionally; Temporal had already proven itself internally for Retool’s primary product, Workflows. That foundation gave the team confidence to move fast and build Agents on durable infrastructure.

“There are some things you just want to take as a given when you're building a product, and this is one of them. With Temporal, we don’t have to worry about orchestration infrastructure. We can build on the same primitives we’ve trusted for years and focus on moving the product forward.” — Lizzie Siegrist, Product Manager

Each Agent run is a specialized Workflow: Temporal manages state, handles retries, coordinates tool use, and enables interactive, human-in-the-loop logic. It’s built for the realities of AI systems that reason, act, and loop until complete.

Temporal’s SDKs allowed Retool engineers to write deterministic Workflows in familiar languages, reusing patterns and logic from their existing stack. Temporal Cloud eliminated the need to manage infrastructure, freeing up the small team to focus on product innovation.

The results

Launching Agents on Temporal allowed Retool to:

• Ship a complex, AI-powered product in just a few months

• Scale to thousands of agent runs per day with minimal ops

• Maintain reliability and state across iterative agent workflows

Just ten engineers support Agents and related infrastructure, thanks to Temporal’s durability guarantees and managed operations.

Without Temporal, we probably would've missed the deadline... or we would've had to hire up a big team... or we would've just launched a less robust product with fewer features because we wouldn't have had the same guarantees.

The same architectural foundation that enabled Workflows now powers Retool’s next generation of automation. With Temporal, Retool delivers dependable, production-grade agentic systems to their customers, without the traditional complexity.

The takeaway

With Temporal, Retool has:

• Accelerated time-to-market for intelligent Agents

• Delivered reliable orchestration for AI-driven workflows

• Simplified scaling and operations with Temporal Cloud

• Empowered a small team to ship fast and scale with confidence

Want to build durable systems like Retool? Get started with Temporal Cloud.