Agentic orchestration / governance may be solved via control planes which sit above the agent layer, governing, observing, and enforcing policy across all agents. But the industry has differing opinions over the best architectural approach.
“Enterprises deploying AI this year are turning their attention from the deployment of agentic AIs to the governance of the growing numbers of agents being released across organisations,” said Charlotte Dunlap, research director for GlobalData.
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“Companies are struggling with how to manage the hundreds or thousands of individual agents built within their organisations — agents built by different teams, running on different platforms, with inconsistent security and governance. This is problematic considering most organisations lack visibility into agent inventory, purpose, and authorisation.”
“The issue of addressing agentic orchestration at the control plane platform layer is moving to the forefront of technology providers’ conversations and strategies, looking to solve enterprises’ lack of visibility, security, and management associated with agentic sprawl,” Dunlap added.
Control planes sit above the agent layer, governing, observing, and enforcing policy across agents regardless of where they originated. The advantage is in their ability to ensure identity and security enforcement and enable cross-vendor interoperability regardless of what framework they use for coordinating agents. This approach contrasts with orchestration frameworks, which are features of agentic solutions that simply coordinate agents.
Leading AI and platform providers have begun announcing strategies and solutions to address this evolving market. IBM positioned the next generation of watsonx Orchestrate as an agentic control plane for the multi-agent era. Salesforce has built its orchestration strategy on MuleSoft’s Agent Fabric. And ServiceNow is featuring its AI Control Tower as the governance layer spanning every AI agent, model, and action running across the enterprise — regardless of which vendor built them.
Other rival platform providers are taking a different direction and keeping agentic orchestration within the confines of their own platforms and product ecosystems. For example, Microsoft has been reshaping Copilot Studio from an agent-building tool into an agent governance layer. New governance features include centralised policy enforcement, agent lifecycle oversight, and cross-ecosystem governance, embedded in popular Microsoft platforms (e.g., Power Platform, Azure) and partner-built agents. Oracle OCI’s strategy for management and governance also currently bypasses a control plane architectural model and remains within the confines of its own ecosystem. OCI Enterprise AI embeds agentic orchestration natively as a feature across the Oracle technology layers rather than positioning a discrete governance layer above them.
