A method is provided to implement a conversational system with artifact generation. A middleware component receives a user input and determines whether there is sufficient information in the user input and a conversation space in a context storage of the conversational system to identify user intent associated with the user input. Responsive to the middleware component determining there is not sufficient information to identify user intent, a communications handler component sends a natural language query to an external data source via a natural language query (NLQ) interface and receives a natural language response from the external data source. The middleware component updates the conversation space based on the natural language response and returns a user response based on the natural language response.