Marketplace & open platform 2026 roadmap session

Executive direction (2025 lessons → 2026 AI-first execution)

• 2025 was “disruptive,” forcing partners to change how they build products and run businesses—where to invest and what to build next.
• 2026 is positioned as the first year to “go all-in with AI”, shifting from AI that assists users to AI that executes work.
• Monday’s strategic platform shift (Monday → 2026):
  • From: “AI helping humans work on Monday”
  • To (2026): “best agentic work platform” where humans + agents (inside and outside Monday) execute work.

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Platform strategy: the “4 pillars” playbook for marketplace/AI app success

These are the core focus areas repeated throughout the platform strategy:

• Trust (foundation for adoption)

  • “No trust, no adoption” (especially for enterprise and regulated environments).
  • Emphasis on:
    • Keeping data within customer-defined boundaries
    • Providing admin controls over AI

• Richness & Depth (differentiation + stickiness)

  • Compete against “lighter/vibe apps” by embedding deeply into workflows.
  • Value comes from:
    • Deep domain expertise
    • High-impact use cases
    • Frequent reliance

• Adoption (discoverability → monetization → retention)

  • Solutions must be:
    • Found
    • Used
    • Paid for
  • Focus on:
    • Net retention (reduce churn)
    • Activation (increase usage of installed apps)

• Developer Experience (speed + low friction)

  • AI-era tooling to iterate faster and ship with fewer blockers.
  • Reduce integration and operational overhead for builders.

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AI solution types partners can build (with examples)

The platform categorizes marketplace offerings into three build types:

• AI-Powered Apps (LLM value-add)

  • Example: A risk analyzer on a board that highlights issues, summarizes them, and helps users understand what needs addressing.

• Agents (decision + action + ongoing/background execution)

  • Example: The same risk app can include an agent that:
    • Pings assignees for updates
    • Escalates to stakeholders with improved visibility

• Skills (triggered tasks, often via Sidekick / in-workflow)

  • Example: After escalation/summarization, trigger a Slack/email update to notify the team without leaving context.

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Trust: 2025 capabilities recap + 2026 security roadmap

Key 2025 trust features (concrete mechanisms)

• Data residency / regional storage

  • Monday Code provides region-scoped storage aligned with account regions.
  • New: added IL region for multi-region apps.
  • Storage services mentioned:
    • Key-value storage
    • Document storage (structured + semi-structured)
    • Object/blob storage (large files like PDFs/media)
    • Secret storage (“vault”) for sensitive tokens/secrets

• Network/IP controls

  • IP allow list (apps can send data only to allowed domains/IPs)
  • Static IP exposure for firewall whitelisting

• Code security scanning

  • Backend code security scan to detect vulnerabilities and hard-coded secrets/tokens

• Marketplace trust signals

  • A partner page with reliability indicators (e.g., when joined marketplace, total installs)
  • Ratings/reputation visibility
  • Feedback loop via the developer center

2026 trust/security enhancements (forward-looking)

• Service token (long-awaited)
  • Allows apps/agents to operate independently (not tied to a specific user), preventing breakage when users leave.
• Refresh token support
  • Shorter-lived access tokens via refresh flow
• Frontend code security scanning
  • For files uploaded to the CDN
• AI governance emphasis
  • Permissions controls at admin/workspace/board levels
  • Activity logging
    • Board activity log
    • Admin audit log
  • Agent Center to manage agents (including kill/suspend/pause/resume if they go rogue)

KPI / business metric targets mentioned (in trust/adoption context)

• No explicit CAC/LTV/CAC payback targets were provided.
• Trust is treated as a prerequisite; adoption and churn are quantified elsewhere.

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Richness & Depth: embedding + building blocks

Developer platform expansion for deeper workflow integration

• Enhanced developer account

  • Access to all Monday products to test apps across surfaces
  • Default 1k items test capacity (partners can request more for scale testing)

• Extension points / UI programmability

  • Ability to customize columns/fields such as:
    • Formula
    • Dropdown
    • Status
    • People column
    • File column (customization mentioned “very soon”)

• API expansions

  • APIs for managing board views, dashboards, columns, and other “building blocks”
  • Aggregation API for widget calculations (max/sum/average) at scale
  • Access to higher-layer objects (e.g., project portfolios)
  • Bulk API to import large item sets from files into a board

• Workflow & automation integration

  • “Long awaited” ability to manage/control automations from apps via:
    • Webhooks to register/subscribe when users interact with app features (columns/views) and then dispatch logic
  • Mention of a set of events; guidance to request missing events if needed
  • Multi-level boards
    • Access rollups and aggregated stats on hierarchical structures

Integration and execution capabilities (operations enablers)

• Simplified credential handling
  • Token + secret management support to reduce partner implementation complexity
• Automation improvements
  • Synchronous automation handling (wait for success/failure)
  • External trigger services with polling services as triggers (roadmap/mentioned; some subtitle confusion noted)

Agent/Sidekick exposure strategy

• “Meet the user wherever they do work”:

  • Add capabilities inside Sidekick (conversational AI)
  • Encourage building skills and agents surfaced inside Monday

• Agent building block (forthcoming)

  • Agents behave like assignable “users,” including:
    • Mentioning agents in updates
    • Adding agents to automations to run in the background
  • Exposed via an Agent Store (“released very soon”)
  • Partners encouraged to share agent use cases for collaboration

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Adoption: monetization + retention mechanics (with concrete churn metrics)

Discovery, activation, and monetization improvements

• Mobile support expansion

  • For:
    • Board views
    • Item views
    • Objects
  • Enables adoption scenarios beyond desktop (frontline, executives, teams)

• Uninstall/unsubscribe friction UX

  • Adds friction during unsubscribe/uninstall decisions
  • Immediate reported impact:
    • -12% unsubscribes
    • -10% uninstalls

• Churn reason exposure

  • In AMP (Application Management Product), churn reasons are exposed as an optional field to help diagnose why accounts leave.

• Retention insight / targeting heuristic

  • Accounts with at least 3 active users have ~20–30% lower likelihood to churn
  • Strategy: boost adoption of installed apps by suggesting them to users not yet using them

• Revenue protection when payment fails

  • Notify in product (and already started via email)
  • Offer a discount when users try to unsubscribe
  • Enforce payment based on accurate Monday seat count
  • Discount/payment enforcement described as opt-in

• Listings/search optimization

  • Improve app listings so users better understand capabilities and use cases before install
  • Emphasize search engine discoverability and clearer expectations

• Admin approval and purchasing flow

  • Expanded admin app management covering approvals for:
    • installed apps
    • purchases
  • Goal: shorten approvals and reduce admin friction

Explicit timeline/targets mentioned

• “7 16 months” appears in subtitles without clear context.
• Migration deadline: end of April for workflow blocks migration (see below).

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Developer Experience: “AI-first” tooling and faster time-to-value

AI-driven developer workflow shift

• Introduced concept: MCP as a conversational interface for agents accessing APIs.
  • Builders can get apps MCP to ship faster by delegating heavy lifting to AI coding assistants
  • Platform MCP is also mentioned for broader natural-language interaction with the platform

Concrete developer features and operations

• Partners can gain programmatic control via:

  • CLI
  • API
  • Apps MCP

• New platform/developer items:

  • Account slug: a user-friendly unique identifier for API access
  • Workflow blocks migration
    • Move from old sentence builder blocks to workflow blocks
    • Deadline: end of April
    • Enables automations across “all Monday surfaces,” including workflow builder and custom builder
  • Community hub
    • Product announcements, feature requests, conversations in one place
  • Issue tracker planned for this year
    • Track common issues and help partners catch up

Commercial enablement features for partners

• Ability to grant discounts to existing subscriptions via dev center UI + API
• Gradual ability to force customers to upgrade to the latest pricing version (for partners with older plan tiers)

Event/task guidance

• Attend Alex’s talk at 11:30 for MCP details (encouragement noted).

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Actionable recommendations implied by the roadmap

• Prioritize trust-by-design
  • Ensure your app/agent follows governance and data-handling expectations; avoid patterns that trigger enterprise security concerns.
• Build for embedded workflow value (Depth)
  • Use Monday extension points + APIs to integrate into views/columns/dashboards and workflow automation.
• Design for adoption loops
  • Expect increased focus on:
    • discovery (listings/search)
    • activation (mobile + multi-surface)
    • retention (churn reason + friction UX)
• Use AI developer tools
  • Adopt apps MCP / AI-first dev workflows to reduce iteration cycles and speed validation.

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Presenters / sources mentioned

• Noriel (leading the open platform group)
• Rotel (leading apps framework and Monday Code product management)
• Maria (referenced as “thank you, Maria” during the trust discussion)
• Alex (talk at 11:30 about MCP)