The era of the agentic enterprise is here. In this new world, systems are empowered to make decisions, with humans providing the inputs and controls required to achieve faster, smarter outcomes across industries.
For example, agentic systems in retail can forecast demand and reorder inventory before shelves run low. They can issue RFPs to alternate suppliers when disruptions like natural disasters threaten the supply chain.
“The enterprise often runs into challenges when they’re using stale data,” says David Egts, Field CTO at MuleSoft. “Even when fresh data is available, any delays around integration or access can cause the business to suffer — especially if competitors are further along in making their agentic enterprise a reality.”
Implementing agentic artificial intelligence (AI) requires a careful strategy, as agents are only as powerful as the data and tools they use. One of the most significant challenges is providing AI agents with secure access to data, other agents, and microservices.
That’s where composable architecture comes in. Each AI agent should be treated as a reusable building block. The goal is to create a large collection of reusable components that can be rapidly assembled by developers and agents to perform a task — in other words, a rich library of reusable resources that can be used across multiple IT projects.
An actionable and adaptable approach
Composable architecture is about more than adopting yet another tactical point solution for developers; it requires a strategic rethink. Organizations need to embrace a culture of reuse, moving away from building everything from scratch and toward leveraging existing assets.
IT leaders should follow four steps on their journey to create a coordinated agent ecosystem:
- Discover
- Orchestrate
- Govern
- Observe
In the first step, IT needs to enable developers and agents to discover and reuse existing assets, so they can accelerate innovation while preventing duplication. In this way, agent ecosystems become composable, scalable, and easy to manage.
The next step is to orchestrate. By dynamically matching tasks with the best-fit agent and enabling them to collaborate with other agents and systems, organizations can avoid creating a disconnected patchwork of agents and instead craft a coordinated “digital workforce.” As a result, complex, multistep processes will execute reliably behind the scenes.
The third step is to govern. IT needs to secure and control every agent interaction. Sensitive data must be automatically detected, filtered and logged. Also, because agents can act bidirectionally to take either role in the traditional client-server model, IT and security teams must protect interactions in both directions.
Finally, organizations must be able to observe the entire process via a single platform. By giving IT and business leaders visibility into how agents are performing, a single view builds trust in AI-powered workflows and enables teams to unlock continuous optimization.
“Without security controls, you’re automating the ability for cybercriminals to compromise agents and do a lot of damage quickly,” Egts says. “Implement protections for agents such as rate limiting, authentication, and zero-trust API policies.”
The need for protocols
Protocols like Model Context Protocol (MCP) can help. MCP enables agents to read from and act on systems of record, while keeping humans in the loop. It gives agents a library of other agents and systems, as well as their capabilities so that individual agents know what resources can be applied to the task at hand. Another protocol, Agent2Agent (A2A), is about communication, enabling agents to hand off tasks to one another and coordinate their work toward completing them.
MuleSoft provides solutions that enable IT teams to build, manage, and deploy apps their way, using the integrated development environment of their choice. With tooling such as MuleSoft Vibes and MuleSoft Agent Fabric, MuleSoft helps organizations accelerate their agentic transformation journey.
The agentic enterprise represents more than technological advancement; it’s a fundamental reimagining of how businesses operate. Organizations that successfully navigate cultural, technical, and security challenges will gain competitive advantages through faster, more accurate decision-making in an increasingly dynamic marketplace.
Get on the path to becoming an agentic enterprise. Learn more here.