---
title: Why AKOS
description: The principles behind AKOS — works in any industry, builds on what you already have, and lets you bring your existing automations with you.
---

AKOS is the operating system for AI agents in production. Three principles shape every part of it.

## Works in any industry

AKOS is not built for one vertical. The same engine — agents, flows, processes, governance — runs finance, legal, healthcare, marketing, support, operations, software, and more. Wherever a person owns a process, AKOS can turn that process into governed automation.

An **industry vertical** in AKOS is config data, not new code: a product name, theme, terminology, role defaults, security posture, and a set of templates. Switching or adding a vertical does not require a different build — the same platform adapts to the language and rules of the work.

- Templates, the marketplace, and assets are all filtered by your active vertical, so you see what is relevant to your field.
- The `custom` process phase accepts any flow, which is what makes processes usable in any vertical.

See **[Concepts overview](/docs/concepts)** for how verticals are modeled.

## Use what you already have

AKOS is designed to sit on top of your existing stack, not replace it.

- **Your own models.** Run cloud models or local ones — Ollama and other local providers are first-class, so models can run on your own hardware with no outbound traffic.
- **Your own keys.** Authentication always references a vault key, never a plaintext token. Bring your own provider keys and store them in the keychain or your secrets backend.
- **Your existing tools.** Connect the services you already use — Slack, GitHub, Linear, Discord, Stripe, Twilio, Sentry, PagerDuty, and more — once, then both react to their events and call back out to them from a flow.
- **Your own infrastructure.** Run the multi-tenant cloud, or self-host the desktop app — including fully air-gapped — when data must never leave your network.

See **[Connections](/docs/using-the-app/connections)** and **[CLI authentication](/docs/cli/authentication)** for how providers and secrets are wired.

## Bring your automations with you

You should not have to rebuild what already works. AKOS can import workflows from other tools — **n8n, LangChain, LangGraph, Langflow, Flowise, and Dify** — and translate them into AKOS agents and flows. And when you move from a local deployment to the cloud, your data and run history come with you.

See **[Migrating to AKOS](/docs/cli/migrating)** for the `akos import` and `akos migrate-to-cloud` workflows.

## Related topics

- **[Getting Started](/docs/getting-started)** — the three ways to run AKOS.
- **[Concepts](/docs/concepts)** — agents, flows, processes, triggers, and architecture.