Abstract: Warm inflation provides an attractive solution to the so-called eta-problem that generically plagues supergravity and string theory models, with additional dissipation damping the inflaton's motion and simultaneously producing radiation during inflation. This can generically be achieved via a supersymmetric two-stage mechanism where the inflaton is coupled to heavy `catalyser' fields that in turn decay into light degrees of freedom. In this talk, we review the main aspects of this mechanism and discuss some of its possible realizations in the context of beyond the Standard Model scenarios. In particular, we discuss its natural implementation in the context of brane-antibrane inflationary models in string theory and how in GUT-like models the inclusion of B- and CP-violating interactions may lead to the generation of a baryon asymmetry during warm inflation.