Wonderful’s bet on AI agents that get the work done
When a flight is cancelled, an AI assistant can explain a passenger’s options. An agent authorised to rebook the journey must check seat availability, apply the airline’s rules, change the reservation and issue a replacement ticket. A connecting flight or a request for special assistance adds further steps, requiring the agent to coordinate several systems and recognise when a person needs to take over.
That hypothetical journey captures enterprise AI company Wonderful’s proposition: extending AI agents from answering enquiries to completing business workflows. Founded in 2025 by CEO Bar Winkler and CTO Roey Lalazar, the company combines an enterprise AI platform with engineers who work alongside customers to put agents into operation.
Both founders had built businesses before starting Wonderful. Winkler co-founded Approve.com, whose procurement software streamlined purchasing requests, approvals and supplier onboarding. Tipalti acquired it in 2021, and he subsequently served as a general manager there. Lalazar previously founded Kaps, an AI-based localisation platform, bringing experience relevant to Wonderful’s early focus on multilingual customer support.
From voice agents, Wonderful expanded into chat, email, back-office processes and applications. By September 2026, it reported 650 employees and operations in more than 35 markets, announcing a US$550 million funding round at a US$5 billion valuation. Its expansion involves building local implementation teams that work alongside customers to adapt the technology to their businesses.
Wonderful calls its platform an AI operating system: it brings together models, company information, connections to business systems and tools for building, testing and supervising agents. The engineers configure these capabilities around each customer’s operations, with the aim of enabling internal teams to build and maintain further applications themselves.
Giving enterprise AI agents permission to act
In a February interview with investor Index Ventures, Winkler described the distinction through a discount moving from a recommendation to a process that routes, approves and executes it. Once software can act, developers must establish which records it should trust, what it may change and how it should handle conflicting information.
For the airline passenger, finding an available seat would therefore be only part of the task. The agent would also need to establish whether it could book that seat under the ticket conditions and seek approval for an exception. Completing the request means connecting those decisions with the systems that carry them out.
Wonderful’s forward-deployed engineers and deployment strategists work alongside customers to map these relationships, building integrations and configuring workflows with customer teams. Their responsibilities include data access, governance and performance, while the resulting workflows define where agents can proceed and where human approval is required.
Such work also draws on knowledge of the local business environment. In a March interview with NIN, Winkler described how custom-built legacy systems, regulations and customer expectations shape implementation. Engineers need to understand the working practices around an application as well as the software itself.
Connecting AI agents to existing business systems
To support those interactions, Wonderful draws on models from outside providers and describes its platform as model-agnostic, allowing customers to select models for different tasks while retaining the business systems they already use. Google Cloud’s customer profile describes a voice pipeline combining speech and reasoning models, with Vertex AI supporting orchestration and Gemini used for retrieval, reasoning and reviewing conversations. The profile also describes simulated customer journeys used to test and refine agent behaviour.
These capabilities handle the interpretation of a request, while tools and integrations connect the agent to records and functions in enterprise systems. Where suitable interfaces are unavailable, Wonderful’s computer-use capability offers another way to reach the software employees already use.
Announced on 21 June 2026, it allows agents to navigate screens, enter information and submit forms inside managed virtual machines, according to the company. Controlled sessions and assigned credentials govern access, while agents can pause for human review and resume once the work is approved.
In the rebooking example, an agent could combine a conversation with searches of reservation records and authorised changes in existing applications. The airline’s systems would continue to hold the booking information, with the agent coordinating the steps needed to complete the request.
How Bank Hapoalim built an AI agent on Wonderful
Wonderful’s Bank Hapoalim case study shows how earlier integration work can support a new application. The bank wanted an agent to handle enquiries about a savings campaign, guide customers through identity verification, check eligibility against live systems and confirm enrolment.
According to Wonderful, a bank data engineer with no previous experience building agents adapted tools its deployment teams had already created. Working with colleagues responsible for identity, eligibility and messaging systems, the engineer brought the application into production in three weeks.
The architecture paired a retrieval source containing campaign and product information with 15 custom tools connected to bank systems. The agent supported voice and chat in two languages, could send SMS confirmations and could transfer calls to a person.
The bank could therefore reuse connections from previous deployments while developing the next application internally. That relationship between outside implementation and in-house development is central to Wonderful’s approach: engineers establish the initial connections and help customer teams learn how to extend them.
The business of becoming embedded
In a September TBPN conversation, Winkler described a library of agents and applications that engineers use as starting points, with much of the bespoke work concentrated in customer integrations. Reusing those components allows teams to build around existing functionality rather than begin each deployment from scratch.
Wonderful earns revenue from the platform and its use. Winkler told Forbes Colombia that it does not sell engineers’ time, while its published standard agreement permits annual subscriptions, minimum commitments and usage credits, depending on the order form. Deployment engineering supports an ongoing platform relationship.
As applications accumulate, so do the connections, rules and operational context embedded in the platform. Winkler explained the commercial significance in the Index interview: “Switching costs in that environment aren’t contractual. They’re structural.”
The same work that makes Wonderful useful can make it difficult to replace. Customers gain a foundation for further applications, while the supplier becomes woven into how requests are handled and decisions executed. Wonderful’s bet is that businesses will keep building on that foundation because extending it offers more value than starting again elsewhere.
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