Solutions
Business patterns of agentic AI
Maximizing the potential of agentic AI in a business means both consuming AI to enhance internal capability and productivity, and reimagining existing digital business as a series of agentic services for customers.
Agent Consumers
The business consumes agents
Your teams' agents, reaching your systems. Agents arrive from every direction: built in-house, bought as SaaS, or wired together in a workflow tool. Each one reaches enterprise data and tools, and no single vendor governs the estate.
The pressure
Velocity engineering from below
Product managers and analysts build working agents in hours. The barrier to deployment is a cron job.
SaaS fragmentation from above
Hundreds of agentic tools spread through the business, each with a new permission scope and a new data flow.
The build/buy line moved
Replace a SaaS tool with an agent and you absorb the management plane the vendor used to provide. Identity, audit, compliance, from day one.
Governance debt compounds
Per-agent and per-team fixes get more fragile as the count grows. Inconsistency compounds faster than the agents do.
Related application patterns
Agent Producers
The product ships agents
Customers' agents, reaching your product. You ship agentic features, or expose an MCP surface customers can drive. Their agents call your APIs in shapes your contract never anticipated, and you now operate two surfaces on one backend.
The pressure
Workflow tools wrap your API
One agent with many tools, many agents each with their own, long-lived calls, agents spawning agents. Shapes the contract never described.
Traffic profiles change
Bursty, multi-step, cross-tenant, authored by non-developers. The call count and the compute time both stop being predictable.
API gateways assume deterministic callers
Rate limits and API keys were built for software that behaves the same way twice. An agent decides what to call at runtime.
Per-tenant blast radius
One customer's runaway agent is your incident. Containment has to be per tenant, and it has to be set in advance.
Related application patterns
The agentic estate
Consistent architectural patterns for AI
Businesses are embracing AI as consumers of its capabilities and to transform the services they provide. Agentic applications can also be defined as patterns comprising common resources.