Progress Bakes Agent-First Development Into Telerik and Kendo UI

Progress Software has released the latest version of Telerik and Kendo UI with a set of capabilities aimed squarely at applications designed for both human users and AI agents.

The pitch is a deliberate step past AI-assisted coding. AI is now embedded in UI generation, application modernisation and the development workflow itself, with the framing that engineering teams need to build production software that agents can interact with directly rather than parse through screen-scraping.

The headline additions read as a coherent set. An Agentic UI Generator embeds component-level accessibility into UI creation, reducing compliance risk at the point the interface is built rather than after the fact. Fiddler Agent Skills give coding assistants direct visibility into network traffic, allowing them to spot problems and propose fixes without engineers hunting through devtools. Telerik Document Processing Libraries add agent tools for extracting structured data, analysing Excel files and generating documents inside existing applications, without an external AI service in the loop.

The most interesting piece is WebMCP. Progress positions it as a way for AI agents to interact with application interfaces through a stable, published surface rather than the brittle screen-scraping approaches that have become the default in agent frameworks. For teams building agent-driven workflows against legacy or half-migrated systems, that matters: an agent reading a documented interface will always beat one guessing at the DOM.

Legacy modernisation gets its own release note. Progress has added automated conversion of WinForms apps to Telerik UI for WinForms, using intelligent control mapping, code parsing and MCP-based automation. On the .NET side, Agentic RAG capabilities connect through Progress RAG-as-a-Service, letting apps use LLMs to converse with unstructured enterprise data without a bespoke pipeline.

"Engineering leaders need to both enable their teams to use AI to scale their productivity and to increase their production of agentic applications. This release enables engineering teams to meet those needs by extending developer productivity and providing pioneering UI tools to build AI-embedded applications compatible with both human and agent interactions."

Loren Jarrett, EVP and GM, Digital Experience, Progress Software

Progress positions the release as extending developer productivity while giving teams the components needed to build agent-ready applications. The company's argument, articulated by Jarrett, is that engineering leaders now have to satisfy two audiences at once: their own teams looking for AI leverage, and the agentic applications those teams are being asked to ship.

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